06.23.2005 | 8:10 pm | Uncategorized
Philip’s Uncle Clinton passed away on Tuesday night. He had ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). He was only 63. It started a little over a year ago when he developed a limp, and soon after, he was diagnosed with ALS. He succumbed quickly to the full effect of the disease, eventually ending up confined to a wheelchair. He recently had to be put on oxygen and was having to take morphine for his pain. He began a rapid decline about a week ago; luckily there was time for his three children to make it into town to be with him. It was expected, but that doesn’t take away the jolt of sadness his passing has caused.
The Uncle Clinton (pronounced “Clinnon” by all the family) I knew for the past 10 - 1/2 years was healthy and strong, witty and warm, and simply one of the kindest people I’ve known. Philip and I both loved him. When I first began joining Philip’s family get-togethers way back in 1994, Uncle Clinton was immediately my favorite. He was relaxed and easygoing, charming, and jovial. He treated me like family from the beginning, always greeting me with his arm around my shoulder and an amiable smile that made me feel welcome and accepted.
He was a genuine Christian, and no doubt was a good husband to Aunt Margaret, and a loving father to his children: Marc, Charla, & Brandon. My thoughts & prayers are with them all tonight, as they deal with the loss of him, and prepare for his funeral and burial tomorrow. Philip and I will be making the trip over to Baker tomorrow, to attend the funeral. It’ll be a sad day for sure.
In my heart, he was truly my uncle, as well as Philip’s. I’ll sorely miss him and his presence in the family.
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06.19.2005 | 9:05 pm | Uncategorized, Daily Life, Gray Matters
To start, it’s apparent that I’m terribly allergic to something mowable in our yard, rather than sick with something communicable. I’m really glad it’s not a cold. But, boy do allergies suck! It’s lessened a lot since Friday/Friday night’s sneezing, itching, snotty free-for-all. I woke up feeling some improvement on Saturday morning, and since then, it’s not been constant, but has instead come in random flare-ups throughout the day. I can live with that. No germs to potentially pass on to my boy, so I’m happy!
Yesterday Philip and I went out to eat lunch alone together for the first time in over 18 months. Wow! It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long…but then again, it does. It was actually the first time we’ve gone out anywhere alone together, in just as long. It was fun, but it was also weird being on our inaugural trip without Grayson. He’s just part of “us”, and without him—to me—it just didn’t seem like we were whole. Gray, however, had a grand time back here, with his Aunt Leslie and his Nana & Papa. They said he didn’t get upset at all (NOT that I wanted him to), but instead he played happily, and he even got treated to some french fries when they had their lunch. I was relieved, because he’s had such a hard time the past few months with being around older people, and I’d been worried he’d lose it when he got left alone with them. But he did wonderfully.
It sounds like it’s me who needs to get over my separation anxiety, doesn’t it? It figures!
Oh! I almost forgot! Happy Father’s Day to Philip, the best dad ever (other than my own!)!
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06.18.2005 | 8:39 am | Daily Life
We haven’t found another mower yet, but I did get the entire yard cut yesterday. Nancy, a friend from church, loaned us her mower! Yay, Nancy! You rock! : ) It was so overgrown, and just Monday, I’d had a snake jump out at me from the tall grass. I’m so glad it’s taken care of for now! When I finished late in the afternoon, I hosed it off, filled it up with gas, and Philip loaded it up and took it back over to her house. He forgot one little thing. It had a bag that we’d detached, and he forgot to put it back on. And he left it sitting in our driveway. D’oh! So we’ll have to run that back over there today. I was like, “Philip, how did you drive out of the driveway, pass right by the bag, and not see it?” He was excuseless. Haha!
I’d prayed that we’d find a way to get the yard cut this week, so there’s another prayer answered. I know he’ll also provide us a “new” mower, so I’m not going to fret about the money or where to find one. He knows we need one, so we’ll get one! : )
I think I got an allergy flare-up while mowing. I started sneezing over & over and my nose hasn’t stopped running or itching since. At first I worried I was coming down with a cold, and I was going to have somebody’s head for coming sick to Tuesday’s family get-togethers. LOL They all know how I feel about that! But it’s lessened overnight, and with the way it just came on suddenly the moment I started mowing, I’m betting on allergies. Every year around early July, I have a week’s worth of allergy symptoms, so this could be it, only a little early. I hope that’s all it is, because I don’t want my little guy to get sick. And I don’t want to have to boycott our family.
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06.15.2005 | 5:38 pm | Daily Life
I believe the maximum winds were 60 mph, but we only had 40 mph winds here at our house, and that was only for an hour or so. After weathering Ivan last year, Arlene seemed like just another summer thunderstorm… only without the thunder! LOL We did have lots of little limbs down, and a couple of big dead limbs that were Ivan remnants finally got blown down from the tops of the trees.
Monday was a busy day for me. I spent all day outside, cleaning up those little limbs as well as dragging the big limbs to our burn pile. I hand-weeded around the entire perimeter or our fence, which is a big job since our neighbors don’t know the meaning of weeding–so we get their monster weeds growing through our fence. Then I rescued our pecan tree from climbing vines. There were oodles of them snaking up all the way to the top branches; I cut them at their roots and pulled them down. I also raked the leaves that had fallen during the storm, as well as filled in random holes in the yard that came from either Reagan (grrrrrr) or an armadillo. Since I was obviously in the mood for outdoor labor, I would’ve loved to have mowed the lawn (it’s 4 weeks overdue), but our mower is kaput. We got the word on Monday from Papa Joe, who we’d brought it to in hopes of him being able to fix it, but alas, he said there’s no hope for it. Sooooo, who knows when we’ll be able to come up with another one. Oy. There’s no way we can pull off buying a new one. But we need to find another good used one fast–the back yard looks like a jungle and the front yard just looks like crap! So, instead of mowing, I finished out the day by washing the truck and vacuuming it out. Whew! I hope all that counts as a workout, because I ran out of time & energy and never got to work out!
Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 32. We spent the afternoon in Crestview hanging out with Philip’s sister & her kids, in town from Sarasota, as well as the rest of his family. Grayson had fun playing with his five cousins–ALL GIRLS–and there’s another girl on the way. Poor li’l guy needs some boys to play with, but I sure don’t know any. We also swung by my parents’ house for a couple of hours, visited there, and then made it home just in time for Gray’s bedtime (9pm). We’d ended up skipping his second nap since he slept a long first nap, so he was thoroughly pooped. I took him in my arms to nurse him, but instead he popped his thumb into his mouth, looked at me for about 5 seconds, and then his eyes rolled back in his head…he was gone! Laid him down in his crib, and he never opened his eyes until a little after 8:00 this morning. It was a good birthday, though I didn’t get to really spend any time celebrating it because we were so busy. This Saturday, Philip’s other sister will come over & play with Grayson for a while, so we can go out and have a little time together to celebrate.
Some pictures from yesterday’s fun-ness:
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06.10.2005 | 12:16 pm | Uncategorized, Daily Life
…’cause Arlene is coming our way. She’s coming right through here, and will either be a strong tropical storm or a minor hurricane. I’m hoping for the prior, but what I’d really like is for her to not come at all. Nine months after Hurricane Ivan, the traumatic memories are still fresh. I’ll never forget the night Ivan the Terrible hit our beloved town, nor the day we finally returned home to a barren and unfamiliar landscape. Perhaps most traumatic of all, was being stuck 45 miles from home for two very miserable weeks, because we made the erroneous decision to evacuate.
I hope Arlene is quick and easy to deal with. I pray that my family remains safe, and that we sustain no damage to our home. I pray the power stays ON. I hope the trees hold up, because I can’t bear the loss of another one. I hope Grayson sleeps through it all. LOL. And I hope tomorrow’s squalls don’t include lightning, so that I can still get out for my daily walk. I don’t mind walking in the rain at all, but I do prefer to avoid lightning at all cost. Heehee…
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06.5.2005 | 12:10 pm | Daily Life, Ranting
Ch-ch-ch-changes. I decided to go plain & white for a spell. I wish Blogger made a template that was ruled, as some of my favorite blogs & journals are. Looks and feels more like a journal that way…
Today sucks. I hate the fact that a lousy, inconsiderate neighbor can ruin my entire day, but alas, that’s the case today. At least so far. See, Grayson sleeps until at least 8am in the mornings (if he’s not awakened by said neighbor). So 8am is when I normally wake up, also. But this morning I was jolted awake just before 7am (an unholy hour in my world), by the loud roar of a…something…next door. It didn’t sound quite like his ridiculously loud monster truck. It stopped pretty soon, and I thought, Okay, I can maybe go back to sleep. But as I started to drift, the banging started. BANG! CLANG!
Oh, CRAP. He’s working on his #$@!*@#% lawnmower!
I lay in bed for AN HOUR, waiting for him to stop, but it continued. Not constantly mind you, but just enough so that everytime I would begin to drift off to sleep, another CLANG would jolt me back awake. I was praying that his noise wouldn’t wake Grayson, because if it would’ve, I fear I’d have next been standing in his yard cursing him out, wearing only my t-shirt and my messy bed-hair. And I really didn’t feel like going to the effort to do that.
Finally, near 8am, he started his monster truck and used it to jump-start his mower. Yes, he jump-started a mower with a truck…we are in redneck-world, remember? But WTF is anyone doing at 7 & 8 am, working on and using a mower? Seriously, there’s a noise ordinance in our county that forbids it–yes, I checked. Because we’ve had issues with this kind of crap going on in our neighborhood for as long as we’ve lived here. I’ve never witnessed such a noisy, inconsiderate community as this one (not Pace, but this particular ‘hood). This guy next door though, is the worst ever.
First of all, he’s not even supposed to live here. He showed up after Hurricane Ivan last September, in the trailer next door to us. Our neighbors two houses down own it, and were planning on renting it out, but after the storm they let this guy, a friend of theirs, stay in it temporarily. His rented house had been badly damaged and needed repair before he could return. But apparently, this guy doesn’t know the meaning of temporarily, because NINE MONTHS LATER, he is STILL THERE. And we’ve put up with his noise and other nuisance to the neighborhood since day one of his arrival.
He drives a piece of crap junky old Dodge truck–maybe an early-80s model. It is horrendously loud. He starts it nearly every morning, before 6 or 7 am, and he lets it idle for up to 10 minutes. Sometimes he revs it a few times, just to be sure he wakes us all up. He works on cars and small engines in his free time, so not only do we have to look at rows of junky vehicles, lawnmowers, jetskis, and the like in his yard, but we get to be awakened frequently by the noise they generate.
He has a 15-year-old daughter who slams the door as loudly as possible everytime she goes in or out of the trailer–which is frequently, as she’s quite popular around the neighborhood (yes, I mean what it sounds like I mean), and spends a lot of time going back and forth to other kids’ houses. She also likes to yell down the street at the top of her lungs to summon her friends, but if she doesn’t make it outside first, her friends often congregate in the street and yell at the top of their lungs to summon her out of her trailer. This is a separate issue, but a couple of months back, we actually had to call the county and have them move the bus stop from the corner by our house, to further down the street, due to her and her friends’ commotion every morning at 7am. Funny, the bus stop near our house was never, ever a noise problem, until she showed up last fall.
I don’t know where the girl’s mother is, because it’s just her & her dad living there.
He does apparently have a girlfriend though. She appears sporadically, usually during the overnight hours (Of course! Why else be together if not for the night time?). I could really care less about her or the hours they share together, but see, I’m forced to know all this because his girlfriend is–no surprise–just like the rest of ‘em: She drives an old, junky, trashed-out BMW (Wait! But, if she drives a BMW, doesn’t that mean she’s classy?!?), and I just cannot find words to describe how unbelievably LOUD that car is. So, when she arrives, we hear. When she leaves, we hear. Even if we’re up and about, with the radio blasting and Grayson babbling, we hear. It literally vibrates our walls. Unfortunately though, most times she comes and goes, it’s between midnight and 6 am. No one could sleep through that monsterous noise…no one. So on the nights she “visits”, I get around 6 hours of sleep, if I’m lucky. And is pi$e$ me off. Even on the nights she doesn’t come around, I lose an average of an hour of sleep due to the either the guy’s noise or his daughter’s crap.
So this morning was my breaking point. I told Philip we’re going to the Sheriff’s office and ask what will they do about this kind of disturbance right next to us. We’ve tried talking to the guy (Philip went over a couple of times last fall and asked him to at least park his truck on the far end of the yard from our house, and to please realize that we have a baby who sleeps right next to the area where he’s out working on cars & other engines, and to try to avoid doing it in the early mornings). If we can’t get anywhere that way (which I hope we will), then we’re going to go see our lawyer about it. I am fully ready to go to that level, in order to get some semblance of peace back in my life. We lived here long before he showed up. We never make a sound to disturb anyone around us, other than mowing our lawn (which we only do after 9am). We’re homeowners, he’s not. We pay property taxes, he doesn’t. Surely we have some right to live without this kind of noise day after day. I’m not out to get money (he doesn’t have any, anyway). I just want him to STOP all the noise and stop disrupting my family’s sleep. Hopefully just the threat of a lawsuit will be enough to get through to him. We’ll see.
And now I’m off to try to enjoy the rest of the day, despite the aches and lethargy due to my lack of sleep.
To be honest, I am truly very, very angry at this guy. I hate feeling this angry. Ugh.
***Updated at 9pm: Well, even noisy neighbor couldn’t ruin my entire day. 
My day got much better. I worked out, which was a little harder to do, being so tired, but it helped me to feel much livlier afterward. Then after dinner we went for our evening walk, which despite the Deer flies (Philip & I BOTH got bitten!), was pure joy and excitement. When we were near the bay we heard Gray’s favorite sound (AIRPLANE!). But imagine our utter surprise when we looked skyward and saw a group of F-18s flying in perfect formation––THE BLUE ANGELS! I guess they were practicing. Can’t beat that to wrap up my day. 
Take that, neighbor guy!
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Farewell, Uncle Clinton