It still hasn’t snowed, although it did rain all day yesterday & all night, too. I think we’re in a dry phase at the moment, but there are a lot of black clouds out there, still. I was happy it wasn’t snowing this morning, since we were out before 5 to make it to the sales. I was disappointed to see that no one had a terrific price on the tv stands we were hoping to get. That was the whole reason we waited to buy a TV, but it’s kind of a moot point, since I ended up spending our TV money on bills.

We have been waiting to hear from the bank we have our car loans through that we can skip December’s payments, but we haven’t yet & I’m starting to think we aren’t going to. It’ll mean I have to get pretty creative with my shopping, but we’ll manage it, we always do. There really doesn’t seem to be that much left to buy, I’m just hoping I can afford what I wanted to get Troy, now.

Troy was discharged on Saturday & I woke up that day with the flu. I’ve been just as exhausted as he has, unfortunately. We really didn’t know how close he came to actually dying until today, when we had a follow-up at the doctor. Apparently, he had a bacteria that only about 10% of the population have, that’s okay in there until it gets deprived of oxygen, then it thrives. At any rate, he’s very lucky to be alive & I thank my higher powers every day.

I think we’re about ready for Thanksgiving, I’ve bought everything I need to make my Candy Apple Cake & Pumpkin Mousse, which I’m going to try to get started on tomorrow, Erin said he’d help me if I needed it. I may wait until Thursday morning to make the cake, since it’s supposed to be really cold & rainy that day & the oven will be a nice addition. We’re supposed to need tire chains by the weekend, at least in the high country. I doubt we’ll get much down here, but it’ll be pretty to look at.

I’ll be so happy when all of this hospital stuff is over & I can just rest. I’m so exhausted at this point & Troy is too. I’m hoping, since he changed rooms last night, that he got some rest, since it was a quieter place. He’ll hopefully be getting discharged today, but after yesterday’s disappointment, I’m not holding my breath or getting my hopes up.

I still haven’t decided on a diet pill, or chosen between prescription or OTC, but I’ve read a lot of reviews & opinions on them, including some today about Anoretix, so we’ll see if we have any money after we get done paying hospital bills.

After he gets out & I can actually think about other things, I plan to start on my niece’s journal & most likely on a couple more while I’m making that one, since it’s actually easier to do more than one at a time, because you can work on the next one as the first one is drying & all of that. It’ll be nice to get back to noral, every day kind of things.

I haven’t been home much since Sunday. We ended up in the ER with Troy at around 10am or so. I wasn’t really satisfied with our experience that day, we never really saw a doctor, just the PA. I have nothing against PA generally, but this one never even came near Troy. He was in horrible abdominal pain, to the point where he could barely hold still. She stayed by the door, never listened for bowel sounds, never palpated, nothing. I’d think that would be pretty important, considering we thought he had a blockage in his bowel, no? They ended up giving him a CAT scan, but there were no blockages, so they did a gall bladder ultrasound & didn’t really see anything, so they sent him home with a prescription for protonics & still in pain. We were told to go into radiology the next morning for a hidascan.

Troy spent the night throwing up & in pain, on the loveseat, calling the ER periodically. He got me up at 7 & we headed to the hospital only to be told that we had to wait until 2:15 for the scan & that it would take 2 1/2 hours. Troy just decided right then he couldn’t take it anymore & we went back to the ER. Within about 45 minutes we were talking to a surgeon & they were talking about admitting him to the ICU. They admitted him, put a tube down his throat, and a catheter & did some more scans. They couldn’t figure anything out & went into exploratory surgery.

A couple of hours later the doctor came out to talk to me. His gall bladder was dead. It was swollen up to about 5 or 6 times it’s normal size & was full of pus gas & gangrene. They got that removed & found out his bile ducts were also infected & spewing pus into his liver. He was in pretty bad shape & when I think about it I get pretty emotional still.

He’s doing a lot better now, but I have no idea how long he’ll be off work or when he’ll be home. I sure miss him, it feels really strange to not have him home. I do know he’ll be out for at least 2 weeks, so I think I’d better go stock up some Amazon books to keep him from going crazy while he can’t work.

Well, I just thought I’d update everyone, I need to go fill a prescription for Rhi & then head back to the hospital.

I was reading some reviews on a few diet pills, just kind of trying to get a feel for what’s available over-the-counter & all. I was reading about one, called Orovo, but in my mind, I kept calling it “Orinoco,” like the Enya song, “Orinoco Flow.” So, before I had even finished the review, I had this whole image in my head of a commercial for it, with that as the background music and everything. When I realized this & actually took time to look at the name, I’m such a dork that I actually blushed, even though I was in here all alone at the time.

I’m sitting here putting off doing the dishes, and sadly, the bathroom is so dirty, I’m also putting off showering. That’s really pretty pathetic, in my opinion. I ought to drag my butt down the hall, grab some clean clothes & just get it taken care of, sheesh.

It feels like laziness is just taking over my house, I swear. The kids sleep until whenever, with pretty much no motivation to do much else, then they get up, and head out, not coming home until 1-2am & I get no help from either one of them around here anymore. Troy works hard all week, so when he’s home he just wants to veg out with his computer, honestly & I feel bad asking him for help.

Lately, I have no motivation to take care of anything. Maybe it’s depression, maybe I just want my house back, after all, 2 months or so ago, it was just Troy & I, and I really liked that. Now it’s back to everyone and it just seems like too much. I liked the quiet, peacefulness of my house after they both moved out, I know that might sound selfish, but man, I had spent 22 years raising kids, I thought I deserved a break. I still do & I look forward to them getting their lives together so they can get out on their own again.

Maybe it’s just my health, and the fact that everything makes me so tired. I need to lose weight, desperately, but it seems that everything I try to do, fails. I need to find an unbiased site that reviews diet pills, and try to find something that I can afford or talk to my doctor or something. There’s very little that our insurance covers other than standard medical treatment & I don’t even know if they’ll pay for weight loss help of any sort, they don’t even pay for Troy’s diabetic educator, so I doubt it.

Maybe I’m just sick. Or tired. Or a little bit of all of the above. Who knows, but it isn’t getting anything done around here.

Man, I really haven’t been feeling well for awhile. I have a headache, my head feels like it’s full of cotton & I can’t stop sneezing, but I’m not sure if it’s allergies or a cold, I just know that I’m starting to dream about feeling well again. Erin & Troy seem to be feeling not-so-great, too, and Rhi probably isn’t, she just won’t admit it.

I was watching some old black & white movie the other night, not really paying attention to it, but I looked up when the leading man was getting ready to get on an airplane & saw a sign that advertised travel insurance, and seemed to be standing there debating with himself about it. He bought some & got on the airplane. To me, this seems like it was pretty commonplace in movies & shows from my childhood, almost as if travel by airplane was so unsure & unsafe that we all needed a little extra insurance to help our families feel secure or something. What about now? Have you ever bought any, or thought about it? I thought about it when we were getting ready to go on our cruise, just because I get a little scared out there, in the middle of nowhere, with nowhere to go, you know? I would probably consider buying some if I was flying out of the country or something, too.

I know, my mind runs in funny patterns, but I get stupid things trapped in my thoughts & sometimes blogging about them helps release them. There are days when nothing does & I’m just stuck with them & there’s nothing I can do about it, kind of like getting those little bits of a song stuck in your head.

I was sitting here thinking about everything the blogging world has taught me over the years. Yes, there have been a lot of negative things, like the way people act when they have a veil of anonymity to hide behind and the dangers that this new world holds, but more important, I’ve seen a lot of good from people. Anyway, I’m rambling, what I was really thinking about was how much more I know about the way we live our lives around the USA & the world.

I would never have learned that in some parts of my country people use their garages to hang out in on warm evenings, in some parts they hang out in their carports & in others they use the porch or a deck. I just assumed that everyone did the same thing we do (which is a porch or deck, if you don’t have one, you usually just use the yard).

I wouldn’t have thought that much about the seasons being reversed in Australia, if I didn’t read blogs from that country & have it in my thoughts as often as I do. I wouldn’t know anything about living on a cattle ranch, or raising a coyote pup or living in a city or on a farm or not everyone uses the same words for things that we do.

I never thought that I would be getting an education when I started blogged, but I think I know a lot more about the world now than when I started, so thank you Blogiverse!

I just haven’t been feeling that great lately & I think it’s affecting everything that I like to do, you know? Most of the time, I love coming into my blogs & letting everyone know what’s going on with me, but for the past 2-3 weeks, I just haven’t felt it. I feel like there’s never anything exciting happening in my life, and when I make something, I convince myself that no one really wants to hear about it. I probably ought to stop doing that, honestly.

So, I’ve been making books, lately. I’ve put together all of the signatures, sewn all of those together & carefully bound them into covers on about 6 books so far. I love making them, I love using them & I really hope that people will want to buy them from us next summer. If I can manage to get a working printer between now & then, I hope to print some specialized pages to go inside of them, too. I made one each for Rhi & myself, using end papers & fabrics that we both chose & I’m so in love with mine & she seems very fond of hers, too.

I think I have one of those wooden bed frames, or maybe it’s a futon frame in storage or out at my dad’s house. I’d like to take it apart & see if I can make a wine rack out of it. Troy & I have been making mead lately & want to branch into grape wine, too, so I can see us needing a better place to store all of these bottles than a bathroom cabinet! If I can’t find that, then I’m definitely going to have to buy one for my kitchen, we put a lot of time & work into our mead, I’d like to store it as well as I can.

I know that I rarely, if ever, talk about politics on this (or any of my blogs) blog, but in the USA today, it’s election day. I really think that every adult citizen should get out there & vote today. I will be, as soon as Troy gets home from work (we have always voted together & I don’t see a reason to change that). We checked to make sure our polling place was at the same location yesterday while we were at the library. I like election day in some ways, I enjoy the fact that you can get a pretty good cross-section of a city just by going to a polling place. You have the ladies in their fashionable clothing & diamond rings, and those in jeans, tees & mood rings, all in the same place, doing the same thing.

I’ll also be happy to see the ads end, even though I know the bashing won’t, it won’t matter who wins, the other side will spend the next 4 years complaining about it, but I don’t have to hear that on every channel that I watch, you know? I don’t listen to talk radio and I don’t watch the news channels (unless there’s a disaster or something somewhere), so I won’t be affected quite as much by it.

So, anyway, do your part & if you’re in the USA, go out & vote today.