Almost in Trouble!

Chris called me at lunch today while I was at Petsmart getting the "bare necessities" for the new puppy we're getting on Sunday. We've only met the people we're getting her from once before, and they thought we were someone else when Chris called to see if they still had pups left. So they called Mark and said they weren't sure they wanted to give the dog to us, cuz they wanted it to go to a good home. So Mark explained that no, we weren't those people and that we'd take really good care of the new pup.

Chris calls to tell me this and I told him to reassure them that I was already spending too much money on this dog we didn't even have yet. This dog is going to be well taken care of! Of course, Chris wanted to know how much was way to much money, so I asked how much would I get in trouble for? (Exasperated Sigh) $150.00. Oh good, I only spend $137.

After a moment of dead silence, he asked what all I had bought. Well, by the time you buy the bed (since the poor thing is going to be living in the laundry room until it's house broken), the training pads, the toys, the food & treats, and the training book, and the spill proof bowls, and the collar and leash, and I'm quite sure I'm forgetting something....It kinda adds up quick!

Can you tell I'm just a little excited? I'm going to teach her how to do tricks. Chris says it won't work with a Heeler, but we'll see.

Families!

I find myself struck by the contrariness of people. Just over a year and a half ago, the whole family was up in arms, “You’ve got to do something about your mother.” and “How could you have let her drive to Tahlequah for your wedding shower? You should’ve gone to pick her up because she doesn’t have any business driving.” And now, today, when I express concern about the fact that Mom is planning on driving Grandma back to Tulsa this weekend, I hear “Who am I to say that she can’t drive wherever she wants to” and “I’m 74 years old and drive everywhere I want to go.” Actually, no you don’t, because that’s why Mom is planning on driving Grandma home, because Grandma doesn’t feel comfortable driving all that way anymore, and hasn’t for years.

Apparently we offended Grandma last night by suggesting that we weren’t sure if it was a good idea for Mom to take Grandma home, especially if Phil is willing to come and get her. I realize that parents are protective of their children, but come on, it’s not like I’m trying to pick on Mom or something. It just happens that after receiving 3-4 phone calls from the highway patrol to come and pick Mom up or they are going to have to arrest her, the little fender benders, the major accident that should have killed her....I feel justified in being a little concerned. Remember this?


It was a very difficult decision to even get Mom another car. One the one hand, at the time of the wreck we were trying a little experiment called ‘Let Mom have control of her drugs’. That experiment didn’t work and so we moved onto the ‘Sherri is going to dole out your drugs for you’ and the ‘I don’t care how much you overdid it today, I’m not giving you an extra pain pill’ approach. Which seems to be working pretty well. It’s very rare now that Mom seems “out of it” and drugged up – although we still have a lot of those overdid it days (2-3 a week). Unfortunately, now that Mom has moved into her own place and I am not planning on seeing her every single day, we have moved onto the ‘I’ll give you a weeks worth of drugs at a time, and if you run out early I don’t want to hear a word about it’ approach. We’re still waiting to see how this one works out. But we did get her a car, she got a 2005 Chevy Impala and is very pleased with it, even if it is gold. (Don’t even get me started on the color issue! Who buys a car based on what color it is? My mother, that’s who!) I'll post pictures of it as soon as I see it in the daylight.

So Chris and I are going to Arkansas this weekend for another PTK event. We’re going to follow the bus there, and then Saturday afternoon when the PTK deal is over, we’re going to go somewhere to camp, and he’s going to do some fishing. I want to stop at one of the crystal mines and see if I can’t dig me up some crystals. Chris didn’t look very excited by the prospect, but I’m going to make him stop for at least an hour! Then on Sunday, we’re going to go pick up our new puppy. I’ve got to go shopping and get all of the necessary items – training pads, a bed, some toys and food, and of course a book on training since I haven’t had a puppy in years and am not sure I remember squat about housebreaking and teaching “sit” and “stay” and all those other necessary commands! But I am very excited and can’t wait to go get her. Stay tuned for lots of pictures.

Birthday Gifts

Lesley sent me a package for my birthday. I'm not sure when I got it, I found it in the kitchen over the weekend, and no one could tell me when it came! Anyway, it had these really cool Lapis Lazuli and Malachite Soap Rocks. They smell really really good, and they actually look like rocks. Chris wasn't sure it wasn't a rock until he scratched one of them!

Anyway, they are really cool and I almost hate to use them, but I'm gonna! She also got me a decorated candle that has a tea light holder in the top of it. Pretty cool. I'll see if I can't take a picture of it to post on here later.

Awesome gifts, and Chris can't complain that I bought some useless pretty's since they were a gift! Thanks Lesley!!!

ftworthmesquite106

ftworthmesquite106
Originally uploaded by bookworm91770.

We found this mesquite tree outside the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. It is the largest mesquite tree I've ever seen. I don't think that 3 people could hold hands around it!

My Misspent Youth

Sandie says she’s never heard this story, I thought I’d told it to everyone by now. Steph tells it a lot better, but I’ll do my best. Mom, you’ll want to stop reading now.

Back in the day we used to do a lot of drugs. Mostly pot, but some acid and pills as well. Being teenagers and therefore invincible, we often would walk around downtown late at night looking for stuff to do. Sometimes we’d find a building we could get on the roof of and go party up there. Sometimes we’d talk to the pimps and their ho’s. And sometimes, we’d hop trains. The trains always slow down going thru town and you could run up behind them, grab the ladder, and jump on. Usually we’d only ride it a mile or two before jumping off, but sometimes we’d get stuck for several miles – it would speed up too fast and we'd have to wait for it to slow down enough to jump back off. Once we ended up at least 10 miles out, that was a hell of a walk.

We had several places we’d go to hop trains, but one of our favorites was at an overpass. We could stand under it and smoke some weed while waiting for the train. This particular night, which was early in the morning November 1st, we waited for a long time but didn’t see a train. So we started walking along the tracks, picking up various stuff to put on the tracks. There were 4 of us this night, and we were walking in a line rather than all together. Steph was in the lead and she bent down to pick up a shoe lying beside the tracks. Just as her hand touched it, she realized that there was a leg attached. Well, part of a leg. We walked a little further down and found the rest of the body.

We found out later that the guy used to be a reporter in Dallas, but when it happened he was a bum who had tried to hop the train and missed. His leg was caught by one of the wheels and he was dragged for several yards. Of course we were all shocked and freaked out. I was convinced that it was a mannequin, and that someone had played a Halloween joke by putting it on the tracks to try to freak out the conductor.

After a brief discussion and a major freak out, we ran back to the car and got the hell out of there. We made an anonymous call to report it and saw in the papers the next day that he had been a well-known reporter some time ago in Dallas.

And that was the last time we ever hopped a train.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Chris spent the last week preparing my birthday surprise. Not very subtly either! Phone calls right in front of me, where I know they are discussing it, but can’t get enough detail to figure out what’s going on. Bastard! He knows I hate waiting on surprises, so of course he delights in surprising me!

He did give me one too many hints though. I did guess where we were going – wasn’t absolutely sure, but I figured it was a good bet. Still, he did very well at keeping the secret. From me anyway. Everyone else knew what it was. The guys were all over for Monday night football last week, giving me shit about it! Bastards!

Saturday morning we headed downtown for my very first legal train ride! We were calling it my very first train ride, and then I remembered “Oh yeah, Steph and I, we used to hop trains.” (Remember the body we found?) Freight trains, not passenger trains, and I’m not sure hanging off the back of a train really counts….

We hopped on the Heartland Flier from OKC to Ft. Worth. There were 4 stops between here and there. The only one we could get off for a smoke break was at Ardmore – a whole 2 minutes! I swear I thought I’d just smoked a really good joint I was head-rushing so badly! I’m not sure what time we arrived in Ft. Worth, but we got off the train expecting to hop in a cab for a short trip to the hotel and then off to explore downtown Ft. Worth.

The first glitch came when we found that there were no cabs waiting in front of the train station. Apparently the train was about an hour late coming in and none of the taxi’s had waited. We got a security guard to call us a taxi who arrived pretty quickly. And then we drove and drove and drove some more. Chris and I are looking at each other going I thought our hotel was downtown. Turns out there’s a Cherry St. downtown and a Cherry Lane about 20 miles away from downtown and we ended up on Cherry Lane!

Normally I make all of our travel arrangements, but since this was a surprise for me, Chris had his Dad make the arrangements. What is truly hilarious about this situation is that Ted is the most anal person ever about double-checking and making sure everything is exactly how you want it before you ever go anywhere. He always creates a trip itinerary as soon as he decides he’s going somewhere and updates it as soon as 1 detail changes. “Oh, we’re leaving at 4:05 instead of 4:00?” New itinerary. So he was horrified when Chris called him to harass him about the mix up.

Originally, Chris had planned that we would go to the Jazz Festival being held downtown and we’d hit a fairly nice restaurant for dinner. Instead we decided that it would be cheaper to have something delivered, so we ordered Fuddrucker’s. I’d never eaten there before and it’s not bad. The onion rings aren’t all that great, but everything else was good.

Sunday we walked over to IHOP for breakfast and then called a cab to come and take us downtown. The original plan had been to leave our bags at the hotel until we were ready to go back to the train station, but obviously that wasn’t going to work now, so we found out that the bus station had lockers we could use. An hour and a half after calling 2 different cab companies, one finally showed up, and we headed for the station. Chris ran in to get a locker while I sat in the cab watching the rain just pour out of the sky. After about 10 minutes, this guy walks up to the cab and tells us that a bus is going to be pulling up in a few minutes, how long are we going to be? Right about then, I look out the back window and see Chris dashing across the street after some guy, they turn around and go back inside. WTF?

Turns out the lockers are computerized. You put your bag in, then go to the key pad and enter the locker number, insert some money, and it’s supposed to lock the locker and give you a receipt. Except when the guy Chris chased down entered in his locker number, it locked our locker. And we didn’t have a receipt. So Chris had to find a manager to open the locker, chase down the other guy for the second time (after which he “loaned” him one of our umbrellas) and we finally got the receipt for our locker.

The other guy was waiting on the train and was going to get a drink. It was really pouring by this time, so Chris loaned him one of our umbrellas, cuz the guy was going to be right back. Except he wasn’t, and there was a cab (actually in front of the station!!!), so we hopped in it and headed to the cultural district, in the rain, with one small umbrella.

We went to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and the Ft. Worth Museum of Science and History, and then back to the train station for the trip home.

All in all, I had a wonderful time. Chris was a bit upset – first the hotel, then we watched the OU game (we won’t talk about that, other than to say that the refs were blind and cheated), and then all the cab issues that we had. But I enjoyed every minute of the time I got to spend with my wonderful husband who planned such a wonderful surprise for me.

Now, I just have to figure out what I’m going to do for his birthday!

School Stuff

Well, in the last couple weeks I've received a couple invitations that I'm pretty proud about. The first is that I've been asked to tutor an Accounting Lab. The college has always had a Math Lab and a Computer Lab, those kind of labs, but they've never had an Accounting Lab and they've asked me to work it Monday nights. It's a non-paying position of course, but it looks good on my transcripts and on scholarship and employment applications.

I received a phone call yesterday with the second invitation. I've been asked to be on the Accounting Advisory Committee at RSC. We will be looking over the curriculum to see if it meets accounting students needs and what, if any, changes there needs to be. It's a one shot deal, but the Dean of the accounting department at UCO (which is where I want to go after finishing at RSC!) is going to be there, and there will be other people to network with.

Kinda cool.

I got my National Dean's List book over the weekend. I have a little 2 line, maybe 3, blurb in there. Looks like next year will have a few extras to put in there!

There are pictures!

P1010271
Originally uploaded by lesleyweiler.

Of the kids. On Lesley's blog. From Flickr

Look at how much Taylor has grown! I almost didn't recognize him in some of those pictures. And Kyra looks JUST like Lesley. And my very first pictures of Beamer. I'm going to save them to disc and take them to the store and print them all.

PICTURES!!!!!

Another Really Long Post

We went to Britt’s birthday party last night. Bob was there (Hi Bob), and it was nice to see him again. He looks like he’s doing well, very busy in an apprenticeship program so he’s going to school and working 2 jobs. He’s excited about it, and I think he’s going to do very well. Saw Bridge, she’s gotten a better job and is doing great. It’s kind of sad, everyone’s growing up. Someone, I think it was Bridge, said something about seeing Huey Lewis in concert, and I said “That’s the very first concert I ever went to!” And then I realized that was 20 years ago. *sigh*

I don’t usually do the italics sigh thing, but it was really appropriate there.

I asked Sandie what Britt’s into when she called to see if we were coming to the party. Books. Of course. The women in this family are the readingest people I’ve ever met. It’s that H. gene. Chris asked if Britt had any Dr. Seuss, cuz that was his favorite as a kid. Nope, they’ve checked some out at the library but don’t have any. Chris was horrified and immediately declared that she had to have “Green Eggs and Ham” and Sam I Am, better known as “The Cat in the Hat".

Yet again, I do my job as a good aunt/cousin and provide gifts that are both fun and educational! As soon as Britt saw that they were books, she started tearing at the paper with both hands. We actually had to take the books away from her so she’d open the next present! She had a great haul though, and lots of clothes and toys including a computer from Gigi that she wouldn’t quit playing with either. Grandpa was upset, they got her a new kitchen, and it didn’t have any of the accessories in the box.

Sandie asked if I was ever going to blog again? I said I don’t ever do anything to blog about anymore. She said I never did and it hadn’t stopped me before! True enough. ;)

Personally, I’ve been a little stressed and depressed lately, so I’ve been making an effort to get some more “me” time. There are several lakes not far from here, and when I can, I stop by on my way home from work and spend some time sitting in the grass, looking out over the lake, watching and listening to the birds, the fish jumping, the wind. Just enjoying. I need to start meditating again, and I’ve even been thinking about trying some yoga or something.

September 1st was the opening of dove season, and that was the holiday weekend, so we were all set for a long weekend out at Sandy Sanders WMA. Chris left Thursday morning to get the preferred campsite. I was supposed to drive out there Saturday morning. It started raining there on Friday night and didn’t stop til Sunday evening. Chris called me Saturday, right before I was going to leave and said the roads were mud and it took them an hour in a 4-wheel drive to get somewhere they could call me. So I had 3 whole days to do anything I wanted!

I used to just get in my car and go sometimes. Pick a direction and see where I ended up. I never went very far, never outside the state, but I’d load up the car and get on a highway and look for something interesting. I’ve had that urge again lately, so I loaded up the car and headed west. Saturday I drove halfway out to Sandy Sanders. That way, if the rain cleared and the roads dried, I could go ahead and meet Chris. There’s these Cherokee Trading Post signs all along I-40, and I’ve always wanted to stop in but never had. So I did, and found a couple of CD’s, and a couple books as well as some Christmas gifts. Sunday and Monday I just drove around, and stopped at some parks and lakes, and just enjoyed myself.

We closed on Mom’s house Friday. Chris decided that he’s not up to (prior injury) moving all of the heavy furniture upstairs, so we’re going to hire a moving company. Then Dad knew someone who knew someone (you know where this is going, don’t you?) and it was Friday before we found out she couldn’t get ahold of the person. So, Mom’s a little upset, cuz with one thing and another, we didn’t get her moved this weekend. Chris is supposed to get something lined out on Monday.

Dad’s a bit upset cuz we’ve told him that he’s not going to be going to be able to get upstairs. He swears up and down that he’s walked up stairs for years and doesn’t understand why we say he can’t now. Hmmm, do you think it has anything to do with the fact that he can’t walk across the room anymore? I know it’s tough to admit that there’s things you can’t do anymore. I’m starting to run into the same thing myself, and I’m only 36 (in another week). But I’m not going to let him fall down the stairs just to prove a point. So he’s mad at me right now. And this after he gave me some book money for my birthday! I’m a terrible, terrible daughter!!!

That reminds me, I am in desperate need of a laptop computer. Well, maybe not desperate, but I really really really want one. And it would be useful at school. I’ve wanted one for a couple years now, and every time we get money set aside for it, something else comes up (usually medical), and so I never manage to get one. The one I want is $550-600. The one I had I bought used back in 1999. It was a Windows 95, and it was one of the original Pentium processors. I can’t even remember what speed it was, but it was s l o w. You could only do one thing at a time on it. Any more and it would lock up and you’d have to restart it. So when we moved Mom down here in last May, we hooked up her computer and I used it for some internet classes. When we moved her back to Tulsa, she said she wouldn’t use it anyway, so I could keep it here to finish my classes. (Prior to that, I was using the computer at work which was a pain.) Since then, I’ve been given 2 computers. The first one is only a 12G hard drive, which is still 100% better than what I had, but I couldn’t connect to and stay on the internet. Then Chris’ dad gave me his old computer. It’s a Windows 98 and he found out that MS was not going to be supporting it anymore, so he upgraded. And he says there’s not a thing wrong with it either. I haven’t hooked it up yet, I was waiting until we got Mom moved and now she doesn’t think she’s going to have enough room. We’ll see.

The point of all that – actually, the point before I went on that tangent up there – is that Dad decided he wanted to buy me a computer for my birthday. And he’s pissed at me cuz I told him I couldn’t let him buy me an $800 birthday present (so I stretched it a little). I swear we are forever arguing about money.

Chris told me a couple weeks ago that he had some surprise planned for my birthday. He knows I hate waiting on surprises, so he always plans one, so a couple days ago I came in and asked him what my surprise was – hoping he’d just automatically blurt it out since I’d made a point of not asking for 2 weeks. He looked at me with this totally blank look on his face! Then he remembered, and whispered it to Mom, and she ran around singing “I know what you’re getting. I know what you’re getting.” like we used to when we were kids.

Originally I’d asked for a deep freeze for my birthday, but we haven’t gotten the garage cleared out enough yet, so we’ll put that off until Christmas. Instead, I’m getting a privy! I love camping, always have. Hate the facilities though. Usually it’s just port-a-potties, and we’ve all had experience with those. Sometimes though, you do what’s called primitive camping – which translates to “There ain’t no bathrooms here”. And usually that’s okay too, cuz you’re someplace nicely wooded, so you can find someplace private. And then there’s dove hunting at Sandy Sanders. A desert. With cactus and mesquite, and not much else. No trees. And what trees there are, there might just be a hunter hiding behind. Not very private at all. So after 4 years of complaining, I get a privy! I’m pretty excited. It’s a shower stall too which will come in handy.

I’ve lost my digital camera. I stashed it someplace and can’t remember where. I’ve looked in all my usual places, and a few unusual ones, but it’s nowhere to be found. It’ll turn up one of these days and I’ll have some pictures to post.

I’ll try to post more often. Shorter posts too!