I love this layout, so it’ll stay, at least through the fall. I’ll add all of my sidebar stuff tomorrow, hopefully. It’s on my desktop & it’s having a hard time staying connected to the internet for some reason, so I’ll email it to myself tomorrow & take care of it from here, or put it on my thumbdrive or something. Right now, I’m trying to decide on a new theme for my other blog and not having a lot of luck so far.

It’s a good thing I planned to stay up a bit later tonight, because it feels like it’s going to take awhile.

If you were here while I was upgrading, I’m so sorry. I thought it was about time for me to get with the program & update my blogs & their Wordpress versions. This site was pretty painless, since it had a fairly new version already, we’ll see if the other one holds up, too.

I will be changing the layout in here pretty soon, too, so be on the lookout for that.

I haven’t written a lot about my daughter for awhile, because, quite frankly, the whole subject these days is just hard for me. I was crushed when I found out that Erin had started experimenting with drugs, I felt betrayed, lied to & alienated by him. He had gone on & on, all through high school about how he was “straight edge” and would never take drugs or drink & all of the sudden he was the kid who was drinking and taking drugs. Rhi seemed to take it even harder than I did, because while I was angry with him & wanted him out of the house, she wanted him out of her life & took great pains to avoid everything to do with him for quite a long time.

She ranted & raved about his drug use every time we got into an argument, screaming that he needed to be in drug rehab. She acted as if I ought to just stop loving him because he was still smoking marijuana, while I was just thankful that he wasn’t doing the other drugs he had been playing around with in the beginning. In July, I found out that she was now smoking marijuana. I was just stunned. She was probably one of the last people I had ever expected it from. I was hurt, worried, angry & again, felt betrayed. Now she comes over here high & I hate it. I hate seeing her like that, I hate knowing that now she’ll very likely never meet her full potential. She has no motivation to do anything with her life now and that really hurts. I feel like we failed.

I think I must have been oblivious sometimes, not to see any of this coming. I did find a pretty comprehensive listing of street terms for drugs, right here, on the US Governments drug policy pages. I haven’t heard any of the kids around here using many of the terms, but they don’t talk much around us these days. She’s been hanging out with Dawn’s daughter, Cherokee, these days & Dawn says they’ve been getting high in her house, so she’s ready to call the police on them. I guess they’d better listen to her when she tells them that it isn’t allowed in her house if they want to stay out of jail.

I hate that summer is almost gone, I’m always a little sad this time of year, whether it’s because it reminds me of sending the kids back to school every year (which I was never a huge fan of, I liked spending time with them) or just because summer feels, and is, a more care free time of year, I hate to let it go every year. I feel like we didn’t do enough, we didn’t get out enough, or camp, or take a vacation or whatever, we rarely do any of these things “enough,” but it’s like I think I can suck the last bit of life out of the season & prolong it with my protests.

Anyway, I’m starting to plan for the months ahead, thinking of Christmas gifts for the kids, dreaming about Myrtle beach vacation rentals for nest year (which we’ll never do!), saving money to go to my 30 year reunion, since I missed the 25th this summer, making plans for our anniversary next month & before that, trying to decide what we want to do on Mabon. It’s not as easy as it has been in the past year or so, since we aren’t in an organized circle anymore, now we have to plan ahead & think about it more. Dawn’s Lughnassa celebration was simple & beautiful, I’d like something like that for Mabon, too. I’m looking & hopefully will find exactly what I want very soon, so I can plan for it & be ready.

Soon, it’ll be a year since I almost lost Troy, I’m hoping I don’t fall apart & start crying again. It’s still hard for me to think about, and if I talk about my feelings during that week, I do lose it & start crying & get very upset. I think I’ll be okay if I focus on how great the year since then has been & the positive changes we’ve both made in our lives & health. We’re both doing so much better this year & caring a lot more about what we eat & staying active, so it was a definite wake-up call for us in more ways than one.

It seems like the past year (not 2009 so much as the past 12 months) have been very hard on my family. It started out last summer with Rhi’s suicide attempt & my dad’s cancer diagnosis, then my grandma died. We thought we were passed the bad days & then Troy ended up in the hospital & nearly died, and I got sick with mono while I was visiting him every day & spent months feeling like I was going to die.

This calendar year has been full of financial problems for Troy & I, more than we’ve had in many years. There were days when we considered bankruptcy again & days when I wondered if we needed to start trying to find the best term life insurance rates we could afford. Things are looking up for us again & Rhi’s working again now, too. Erin’s been gone for month’s, but I’m not fixating on it, he’ll be okay & if he isn’t, we’ll deal with it if it happens.

We changed a lot of things lately to try to lessen the stress in our lives & it seems to be working. We feel a lot more relaxed these days, at any rate & I’m all for that. We needed to do this for awhile & I’m so thrilled that we found a way to do it.

We got our first shipment in yesterday for next year. I decided early on that if I was going to do this thing I was going to start doing it right & spending the year planning, purchasing, pricing & preparing. We hope to have a bunch of neat items to sell by next July & I’m already thinking up ways to display everything & hoping to get some things built to do that with soon.

The best thing about all of this is that it’s something Dawn & I both believe in & want to make succeed, so it’s that much more satisfying when we make a sale, or something sells out & it’s a lot of fun, too. It seems like no matter what we’re doing together, whether it’s looking at women shoes, r grocery shopping, walking, camping or just hanging out we have a great time together & there is no other person I’d rather be in business with.

Speaking of Dawn, I need to get ready to go grocery shopping with her, we’re having a picnic tomorrow at Navajo Lake & I need to get some stuff for that!

I have been spending a little time sitting around & thinking about things that I could make quickly & somewhat inexpensively that people might actually buy from the booth next faire. People don’t seem to buy much of our handmade merchandise, other than the signs I paint, so it’s hard to figure out what they’d really go crazy for. I’ve thought about making nice cases for things like cell phones & Mp3 players, out of brocades & tapestry fabrics, so that people could easily wear them with their garb, but there are so many different types out there I’d never be able to figure out the different sizes.

Dawn’s got a bunch of pouches that she made a couple of years ago, but no one really buys them, so that’s pretty much out of the question. I don’t feel like making garb, mostly because it’s too much of a time drain & isn’t inexpensive to make, at all. I’m not creative enough to make good jewelry, I don’t even like the stuff that I’ve made in the past.

Do any of you have any thoughts about it? What would you buy handmade from a Renaissance Faire? What wouldn’t you even be interested in? Any input is appreciated, we’re still trying to find our niche in this whole world of faires & such.