Gonna be laying low for a bit...

Let's just say I've been "dooced" if you don't know what that means google it!

So I have a lot of loose ends to tie up and a lot of desperate plans to make.

Hopeful in some ways - but SAD overall...

The VA Disability Application is proceeding - I have spent the last few weeks gathering medical records from the far corners of the earth it seems. The VA could make a decision within the next 30-60 days, hopefully that decision will be one that makes us happy.

I'm sad though because reading through the records we've received is disheartening. Pete's MRI's show extensive scar tissue, lots of lesions, black holes in his brain (sounds super scary) and brain atrophy. The doctor's comments say that he does not believe that he is showing signs of dementia but holy jesus I sure do.

"Dementia is characterized by a progressive impairment of memory and intellectual function that is severe enough to interfere with social and work skills. Memory, orientation, abstraction, ability to learn, visual-spatial perception, and higher executive functions such as planning, organizing, and sequencing may also be impaired."
(Source)

This describes EXACTLY what is happening from my point of view: "progressive impairment of memory and intellectual function that is severe enough to interfere with social and work skills" and it makes my heart hurt to think about it too much.

The good news - the doctor's reports should concur with our opinion that Pete is no longer employable.
The bad news - my husband is slowly slipping away from me and it looks like he's not coming back. :(

If the eyes are the window of the soul...

Vacation Tales... (with photos)

This is the beach house we were renting, it was very, very nice!


This is as close a shot as you are going to get of me in my bathing suit:




The famous corona shot:



Me sneaking a kiss between shots while playing pool on Friday night:


The annoying friends:


So there you have it - my vacation in pictures!

Vacation Tales...

Still haven't gotten the pictures sorted out but here are a few things that really made me smile at the time.

1. Old dude in bar telling me I was gorgeous and my husband acting a tiny bit possessive and letting old dude know I was with him. :-)

2. Visiting the house of a good friend of the people we were there with - their flamboyant gay friend told me I was too cute to be with my husband! LMAO - he was mostly kidding about the hub's as he is a fairly handsome dude but was complimenting me.

Vacation ego boost - check! Hubby realizing that other men find me attractive and feeling a tiny bit insecure for a change - check! LOL

Vacation Tales... (part one)

Starting with the bad things:

• Hubby's friend refusing to let us pay for anything EVER! He would leave the table to go to the bathroom and hunt down the server and pay for everything - wouldn't even let us leave the tip. Generosity is nice but he refuses to let anyone else be generous - EVER - and I know I make at least 2X more annually than he does so why the show?
  
  
• Hubby's friend refusing to stop the car and let me get the GPS out of the trunk when we were clearly LOST! TWICE - the 2nd time when we were on our way to the airport - assuming that he knew how to get to the airport (bad assumption). When he refused to stop this time I activated VZ Navigator on my phone for $2.99 so it could tell him to turn the fuck around! We got to the airport less than an hour before our flight because of his 30 mile out of the way detour - thankfully DFW wasn't busy and we got on with no issues.
  
  
• Hubby's friend getting obnoxious drunk every day. (this leading to the door banging night)
  
  
• Hubby's friend having to "one-up" every story including when Pete's air force friend he hadn't seen for 25 years came to visit us on Saturday - Scott had to one-up him too and it was so embarrassing!
  
  
• Hubby's friend's severe case of ADHD, completely incapable of sitting still for more than 2 seconds at a time, I swear my 2 year old nephew has a longer attention span.
  
  
• Hubby's friend insulting poor girl at liquor store with his insistence on speaking in Spanish to anyone who looked even slightly Hispanic. She answered him back in English and he says "oh you want to work on your English?" to which she replied "No, I was born here and I don't speak Spanish." I was mortified.
  
  
• Hubby's friend talking through and over anything and anyone all the time. Watching a movie - he will spoil it by telling you what's going to happen next.
  
  
• Hubby's friend constantly going on and on about being a "Marine". Big fucking deal! Once when he stopped to ask a cop directions, the cop yelled at him and told him to pull off the road first and his answer "I'm a marine." My thought was so what? does that give you a free pass to ignore the rules? I guess to him it does.
  
  
• Hubby's friend refusing to let airport personnel push Pete in the wheelchair to the gate (while I carried the luggage) and instead making us wait while he goes through the line to get a security pass so he can push him. Remember at this point we are already over an hour later than I wanted to be and he is making us wait because he needed hubby's boarding pass to get his security pass.

On the way home hubby turns to me and says - "Well I've had my yearly dose of Scott ____." And I said "hear, hear!" and then he kissed me and we cuddled on the flight home.

Being united against the annoying guy was just one of the many good things about our vacation. There were lots of good things on this vacation too - I'll save those for another post tomorrow and hopefully sort through some good pictures to share too.

~TTFN

People who try too hard...

The people we are on vacation with are of the variety of "people who try to hard". They want to be the center of attention, want to be the life of the party, want to tell the best stories, want to be the most generous. It's exhausting.

This is my husband's best friend from high school. He reconnected about a year ago and this is the 2nd time we've spent a week with them. I remember now how I was ready for them to go home about 2 days before they were actually going home. And here I am after three days with them, wishing for some peace and quiet for the next 3 days of my vacation.

The wife is not bad - she is not a show-off but his buddy is ADHD to the extreme - a VERY heavy drinker and always has a better story than the one you just told.

It gets old. AND he insists on paying for everything always. The main problem with this is they are basically minimum wage workers and I don't want to take their money all the time. He has insisted on paying for both nice dinners and in fact goes up to the waiter before dinner is over and pays so when I get out the credit card it's already been paid.

And he is an obnoxious drunk - last night we left the bar and went to bed around 12:30 and three times between 2am and 3am he ran down the hall banging on our door and trying to wake us up. What for I don't know but I slept like crap.

Tonight we are supposed to go out for karaoke and I just really don't want to go. But I don't think he'll let Pete and I stay here and watch a movie and snuggle on the couch without creating a HUGE stink. So we will probably go to the bar for a bit at least.

Don't get me wrong I am mostly having a good time - but people like him exhaust me. Pete's fed up with it too - so at least we are united in our dislike.

Good Customer Service is Rare...

So I'm sitting in the airport in Albany, NY after having a very bad situation turn out in my favor thanks to a very helpful gate agent with United named Denise!

We got to the airport at 4:45 for a 5:45 boarding time to find out that our plane was delayed 1.5 hours and there was no one able to help rebook for awhile. Then they sent us all to another gate, and when we got there and waited in line they told us to go back to the original gate.

I don't think I need to say my husband doesn't handle stress well and was about to stroke out. My efforts to calm him made things worse and I was ready to just go home and give up on the beach.

I called United to see if they could re-book me over the phone so I could at least know what is going on. They said I had already been rebooked and I should just wait - but gave me the info.

Now they wanted me to fly from Albany to Dulles, then from Dulles to Chicago, finally from Chicago to Dallas and arriving a full 6 hours later. I asked the agent on the phone if they could instead book me to Houston and the agent kept ignoring my question and saying I had already been rebooked and to wait for the gate agent to help me. There was no gate agent.

Finally the gate agent comes, and I explain the situation to her. That 2 connections would possibly kill my husband (and he gimped around slowly with his cane to prove the point). She switched us to a continental flight through Newark into Houston and now we will be arriving in Houston at 2:10 - so to the beach by 4pm (instead of 6pm if we had left from Dallas).

So for all the hassle we end up ahead of the game and all thanks to a very understanding woman named Denise who went above and beyond. I would write a letter to the airline praising her but she technically wasn't supposed to change destinations and could get in trouble so I really don't want to call attention to it! :)

Hurting...

Things have been bad lately - husband flies into a rage over any tiny thing that doesn't go his way. He is clinically depressed (started see a therapist today so HOPE), has severe anger issues, and is just all around miserable. I take the brunt of his misery and it is making me seriously depressed too.

To recap my life of late:

• Working at a job I don't like for a boss I can't respect
• Husband not working since September, financial security crumbling around me
• Husband in the process of getting VA Disability but it takes so long
• Husband has ZERO patience for above
• Bills to pay (lots and lots)
  
• House to care for
• Bank account empty - back to living paycheck to paycheck after a decade of prosperity
• Wondering how to get enough money to pay everything on time
• Considering paying the car insurance with a credit card when it next comes due in Sept
• Considering cashing in retirement accounts that have lost 50% of their value in the last 2 years at a HUGE loss to pay bills
• Wondering if my marriage can survive one more screaming fight
• Wondering if my heart can
• Feeling guilty for thinking how nice it might be to come home to an empty house with no one to yell and no expectations
• Feeling even more guilty for even thinking of abandoning the disabled spouse - "in sickness" and all that
  
• Praying super hard that vacation will ease some tension and put some levity back into the situation

Where I get my childish ways...

This is my dad - he is 62 years old and last week he was having a blast riding a merry-go-round. I take after him in most ways - my tendency to worry too much, my tendency to shoot off at the mouth, my tendency to feel insecure and insignificant, but also the good things, my sense of humor and my ability to have fun anywhere I go.

I know Father's Day is a few weeks away still but I got this picture tonight and I just wanted to share my daddy's fun picture!

Living in the burbs...

Hubs and I lived in a small ranch house in a northern suburb of Cincinnati from 1999 through 2004. The subdivision we lived in was built post WWII and featured thousands of nearly identical brick ranch houses with 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom and a 1 car garage. Living in the burbs is interesting - especially if you have interesting neighbors.

To our left was a couple about 20 years older than us with one kid left at home a 19 year old boy who imagined himself to be somewhat "gansta" even though he was a skinny, pasty white kid. His Nissan Sentra was his pride and joy and he desired to make it look like a car from the Fast and the Furious. He had a slammin stereo in there apparently and we could hear the bass throbbing when he was still 2 blocks away. He had a habit of turning that stereo on at a level to rattle our windows while he was washing and waxing his car every weekend. It was an annoyance and hubs would often go out there and tell him to turn down the volume - he would until hubs went back inside and then it started all over again. We were happy when he moved out! His parents were nice people but total rednecks, every fall the dad went deer hunting and would drag his dead deer back to the burbs and hang it in the tree in his front yard. Reminded me of home sort of.

Across the street we started out with an old lady and her yappy chihuahua dog, she was friendly and nice. Then she sold and moved in with her daughter. The people that lived there after her were not quite as easy to take. A single mom with 4-5 kids (was never sure) and her deadbeat brother who never seemed to have a job. Their lawn was never mowed, their kids ran wild and were full of attitude, the mom was ignorant of her kids behavior. Thankfully they disappeared one day and we found out they were foreclosed on - apparently after moving in they never paid even one payment. Nice!

Next to them was a rental house that turned over several times. The people who lived in that house were always entertaining. One couple had the police there for domestic disputes weekly and once the guy was pounding on the door in the middle of the night screaming at her. Another time he threatened to drive his truck through the front window cause she locked him out. After they left a much quieter couple moved in, until her car was repo'd and she chased the repo guy down the street with a baseball bat screaming like a lunatic.

On the other side of us was also a rental house but these people were long term. They were totally welfare peeps and trashy BUT friendly and quiet. Our biggest complaint was they didn't mow their lawn as often as they should and that they had a deaf cocker spaniel that barked at us all the time. Then their son moved home - he was pretty quiet but had a string of cars coming and going. A car would pull up, he'd go out and stick his head in the open window to talk and a few minutes later they would pull away. 4-5 times a day this happened. Didn't take long to figure out he was dealing. One night in the dead of winter around 11pm I looked outside and saw 4-5 men in black holding guns in my backyard and I freaked, one of them knocked on my sliding door and showed a badge. I opened the door. Apparently someone hopped on on something the kid sold had taken them all hostage next door and they were trying to deal with the situation. They told us to stay in the house - yeah we were going to bed but not now. Then the cops are back knocking on the back door - they are rescuing people who were barricaded in the bedroom and since no one had coats or shoes and it was Winter they wanted us to let them in our house. We did - the dad was stuck though -at nearly 400lbs he could not fit through the window they were rescuing through and had to stay in the house with the druggie with a knife until the police could subdue him. It didn't take long and the hostage taker was actually a "friend" of the drug dealing son. Somehow he escaped from any blame in this and the police never suspected that the druggie was breaking in for more drugs? So for a few weeks the stream of cars stopped but soon enough he was dealing again.

Now I live in the sticks and the only thing out of the ordinary that happens is finding baby deer sleeping under my trees or waking to the farmers cows all over the lawn AGAIN. It's a trade off I can live with.