things that go bump, or rather BANG, in the night

so there i was last night. all chillax in the living room with my husband and we hear a BANG outside. husband says, "that sounded like a gun shot." to which i replied "because it was."

so about 15-20 minutes later my father in law, who if you will remember lives next door, comes walking up on our front porch. he has a mag lite in one hand, a pistol in the other and he is wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. a beautiful picture, let me tell ya.

apparently the neighbor on the other side of his house said she saw somebody trying to break into her bedroom window. she has a single shot rifle and so she fired her only shot "over the guy's head" and caused him to run off. ummm, ok.

so husband grabs his handgun and his mag lite. we both throw on flip flops and head outside. the three of us walk the back of our fenceline and visually skim every corner and possible hiding place in our back pasture. nobody is there.

by this point, i am nerved up. i am a little freaked out. no, i am a lot freaked out. i hated living in houston because of the crime. country life suits me just fine because there is virtually nothing bad happening out here besides an occasional drug bust or a drunken domestic violence call. the very idea of a person with ill intentions creeping around in the darkenss outside my house gives me chills.

so we finally come back inside. husband keeps his handgun loaded. he loads his .22 and has it ready as well. about 30 minutes later we hear another damn gun shot. seriously? seriously? is this "let's entirely fuck up halfy's head night"? nothing was happening outside.

there were no neighbors outside talking and the law never did come even though they were called. as the rest of the evening went on, i kind of decided that the neighbor who claims to have seen the would-be intruder is a bit off her rocker. their back yard is a dump. more than likely she saw a raccoon or a 'possum bopping around outside her window and didn't know better.

you would think that even stupid criminal types would know better than to try to jack with red neck country folks. i mean, everyone out here is armed. pretty much everyone out here would shoot to maim if not kill. and really, from the house that was supposedly targeted, there was no where to go but back out onto the highway and be seen. idiots.

surprisingly i slept like a log last night. nothing else went "BANG"!

time flies

yesterday was my precious baby's second birthday. it's so cliche, but i must agree that time flies and that they grow up so fast. what other cliches? how about that he defines unconditional love?

i was in labor with the little devil for 24 hours and finally had to have an emergency c-section. that pretty much paved the road for him to be a royal pain in the ass ever since. but god, how i love him. i just can't imagine our lives without him, now. doesn't he look thrilled?

he is still a baby in our eyes. the fact is, besides his cousins (two of which live a couple thousand miles away), he has no friends. so he had no big fabulous party. there is time for spendy gimicky flashy birthday parties when he gets old enough to remember them. we had cake with the family and opened presents. he had a blast.

when he thought nobody was looking, i caught him sticking his finger into the cake and having a lick.

i planted some seeds last year

and some of them grew.

what the hell am i talking about? some astrological mumbo-jumbo. i don't know. it seemed like a good idea at the time.

i was told that any seeds, literal or figurative, planted in the time between a solar eclipse and the next full moon would be very significant to us 6 months down the road. the task was to make up a list of 100 goals or desires that the list writer would like to see come to fruition in the next year. seal up the list and don't look at it for one year. when the year has passed, look at your list and see what has "grown".

i only came up with 38, not 100. about 20 of them came to fruition. my closet was cleaned out. i have lost some weight (not all that i wanted, but about half), i am more active and exercise pretty regularly. i failed in the realm of quitting smoking and a few other things. it's very interesting to me to look back and see where my head was then, especially considering everything that i have been through in the last 12 months.

i have no clue when eclipses and full moons and such happen. i don't care one way or the other about astronomy or astrology. however, i really like this idea. i think i will sit down and create a new list of things i'd like to see myself accomplish in the next year. i hate new year's resolutions. they always seem to be grandiose and unattainable by about January 3rd.

what seeds will i plant? what seeds would you plant?

just what the half needed

a weekend to laugh myself silly, drink too much, and just generally forget the rest of my life.

a weekend with girlfriends will surely cure what ails you and in my case i want to thank everyone that was a part because it was some very very much needed therapy. love you all and can't wait to do it again!

hurricane recovery

ike came in on a friday night and saturday morning.

on thursday afternoon my husband, child, SIL and neice headed to my brother's sturdy brick apartment building where we hibernated until sunday morning. the first side of the storm was not bad for us. the eye passed over us and i thought "well, the second half shouldn't be much worse than the first. it was. or at least it seemed to be.

thanks to my brother having a generator, we watched news coverage all night and all day on friday and saturday. the kids slept but none of adults got more than a couple of hours. it was exhausting and surreal.

when we came home we had trees uprooted everywhere. thank the universe that my home had no structural damage and the rest of my family here had only minimal house damage. we spent an entire week just cutting up trees that had fallen and cleaning the yards. there is still work to be done and work in progress.

the electricity was out for a week and a day. our water was off and on for the first several days. since my father in law has a camper with a generator and air condidtioning, the whole family piled up in there each night so that we could at least get some cool sleep.

it was a shitty week. things are still shitty but i have to be grateful that things weren't any worse than they were. so many people had so much more destruction and loss than we did. my family is fine and that matters most.

we were told our elctricity could take four to six weeks to be back on and i nearly cried and kissed the linemen on the mouth when they got us back up and running when they did.

it seems odd to me that it's now late september. during the last couple of weeks my entire world has been about hurricane preparation, survival, and recovery. that there was more going on in the world besides this is almost foreign. presidential campaign? middle east crisis? huh?

i have very mixed and scattered thoughts about this whole experience. this was only my second real hurricane. i know that as long as i live here there will be more, but i could really do without them. as more things come to mind about it all, i'm sure i will spew them out here. but life goes on, it has to.

i just want to get some sleep

but my mind won't stop.

thanks to Ike, the bastard banshee of a storm, i am all uneasy.

i find myself somewhat complacent after Gustav threatened and then left us greatfully underwhelmed here. i don't want to shop tomorrow. i don't want to pack bags. i don't want to spend any amount of time hunkered down in someone else's house for safety. and mostly i don't want to worry about what shape my house will be in after the storm. IF, in fact, the storm even hits us.

gah. i laid down in bed 2 hours ago. my body is painfully exhausted. i got back up 1 hour ago becuase just laying there knowing i am not sleeping does nothing more than piss me off.

i have running lists going on, mentally. the list of things that i must take for the kid. the things that are sentimentally valuable such as photographs. the things that fall into the "important papers" category, the things i can't live without (my leave-in conditioner), the things i need to re-stock up on like drinking water and peanut butter and mindless crap magazines to help me pass the possible time with no power.

anyhow, normally when i absolutely can't sleep, i will take one single bendryl and then be comatose within 30 minutes. but now it's too late. if i take a bene now, i will end up even more groggy and exhausted tomorrow.

fucking hurricane. i don't need this shit. and it probably won't even affect us.

we are, in fact, a hurricane magnet

yet another hurricane is coming our way... maybe.

we had edouard. then we were threatened with Gustav, which thankfully changed course at the last minute and hit Louisisana rather than the northeaster Texas coast. now we have Ike brewing around in the gulf.

it was supposedly headed exactly at us yesterday but as of the weather forecasters this morning it may be hitting the southern Texas coast now.

who knows?

i am just sick to death of the anticipation. the stocking up on crap ass pre packaged foods that won't go bad if the electricity goes out. it's so stressful waiting and watching a friggin storm as if we have nothing more productive to do. really!