STRESS!

It is amazing how the body can manifest physical symptoms of stress. Bud and I have both been suffering from back issues--his is his lower back, and mine is more in the thorax region. It was so bad for me last week, I had to miss a day of work and have Bud take me to the ER--just got the bill, and THAT just doubled my stress!

We are also taking our stress to bed with us.  We have both suffered from fitful nights these last several weeks. For Bud, it has taken a turn to violent outburst when he is in the deepest sleep. Usually it is the yelling that wakes me up, but sometimes, it is the blows.  Lately, he has taken to beating the shit out of a particular family member in his dreams each night. Unfortunately, he physically acts out his dream, and some nights, I have to jump out of bed fast!f

Bud, or course, feels awful that he had been taking swings at me in the dark as he beats the tar out of this person. I find it intriguing that Bud's sub-conscious has decided the best way to relieve the stress is to punch the living daylights out of this person--dream therapy? We can do things in our dreams that we really can't act out in reality (translated: vindication in dream state, prison term in reality).

I have been having dreams about my son on almost a nightly basis.  One night, he was a young warlock who wasn't able to control his immense powers; another night, he was just a little kid who ends up being punished in a way for something that was really my fault; in yet another, we were helping him move, and I realized he had so little to actually move, it made me sad.

As Bud's doctor pointed out, we need to focus on the stuff we can control, and stop stressing about the things beyond our control.  We have a roof over our head; we are not starving; we have electric and water and a toilet that flushes; we have transportation; we have friends; we have family; we have each other. The rest?  It is just stuff. We can't control it, so we need to just let it go as best we can and concentrate on the things that bring us peace.

I had just started riding my bike and doing yoga when this back stuff started to flair up. I am going to try and start back with the yoga little by little, and finding time each day to just meditate on peaceful, peace-filled thoughts. Hopefully, the new sleep medication will help Bud to have a tension-less night so he can get a real night's sleep.  Maybe, just maybe, we can release the stress, and it will release its grip on our backs.

To the things I can't control: Kiss my ass!

It's the Little Things...

While I have been mourning the fact that one of the few bloggers I follow is not going to be blogging much any more, another, who stopped blogging back in December, resurrected her blog, and that made me very happy. She is such a fantastic writer--love her wit! I am glad she is back.

I also had a great dream last night involving a wonder home that we were looking to rent. The woman renting the place said we didn't have to pay rent for the next seven months, because the the previous tenants had paid that far ahead, and didn't leave a forwarding address for her to send the rebate check. The only condition she had was that we clean it before moving in. We took the tour of it, and wasn't too bad, just needed a good once over and the carpet cleaned. (For the record, Bud and I re-cleaned any apartment or home before we moved in, as you just never know...).

The cool thing was that the home was fully furnished, and not with cheapy furniture, either. It even had dishes, pots and pans, etc. The only thing we needed to move in was our clothing and personal items! It was so cool, too--it was actually a duplex, but instead of side by side it was front and back.  The front was empty, too, and my step-sister was going to move in to it with her daughter (in my dream, the rental was owned by a member of her church--that is how we found out about it). While the woman was giving Bud and I a tour of the back unit, her son was giving my step-sister a tour of the front half.

I felt bad, because our side overlooked a beautiful lake, and her side would face the road, but she told me not to worry, because she and the son really hit it off. Turns out they had dated on and off over the years, and were reconnecting.  He owned a huge house down on the lake, and he had invited her to come live with him, no strings. 

Our side was set up pretty cool. The entrance took you directly into the kitchen. Not the kitchen of my dreams, but it was as small as some of the kitchens we have had in the past.  Beyond the kitchen was the dining room and living rooms, with a staircase that went to the lower level.  At the back of the unit was a bedroom and a bathroom. The lower level was a finished walk-out style basement, and it was obvious it had only recently been remodeled. It had three bedrooms (fully furnished, one with bunk beds) that opened to a large family room. Off the family room was a well-appointed laundry room with a new washer and dryer. The family room had a slider that opened to a walk-out patio with patio furniture and a fire pit, and that view of the lake.

I woke up thinking, "I want that house"!  I am in such a good mood, feeling positive and hopeful. I had went to sleep feeling stuck and depressed (this house is sooooooo small, it feels like we are constantly on top of one another).

Maybe things are about to change for us...fingers crossed!

My Novel

I have officially begun to add to my half-finished novel, and it feels good! I had to re-read the story to get myself re-acquainted with the cast of characters. I found lots of typos, and time-line errors. But overall, it is a good story!

My goal for myself is to have this puppy done by Christmas. That means a LOT of writing between now and then. I thought I was closer to being done than I am, but at 140 pages in, I am about half way done. And that is the manuscript version. Once it is put into paperback format, it will be a lot longer than that.

I know the story will evolve and things will be changed/edited/added to make it an even better read. I don't want people getting to the middle as thinking, "God, is this book ever going to end?"

I like to write. I really do. You would never know it with my sparse postings, but I really do like to write. Here is a list of things I would do if we one the lotto:

1. Buy our house on the hill with a view--no longer an option. House is no longer on the market.

2. Write. A lot.

3. Sing. A lot.

4. Garden, as much or as little as I wanted.

5. Play Pogo in the middle of the night, and sleep as long or as little as I wanted to.

6. Travel.

7. Get some fun exercise equipment and have a "real" work out room.

8. Learn to play the keyboard.

9. Get my songs published and recorded.

10. Baby my baby.

11. Get pedicures, manicures, massages, and haircuts whenever I want, not just when I can afford it.

12. Create a wonderful kitchen full of wonderful foods to cook.

13. Help others in need.

14. Go fishing.

15. Get a really good digital camera and take lots of pictures of everything.

16. Start scrapbooking again.

17. Take a nap like old folks do.

18. Have cookouts and karaoke parties.

19. Run around naked if I feel like it.

20. Paint--and I don't mean walls.

This list could go on and on. I know they say money can't buy happiness, but it CAN give you time and reduce the stress of NOT having money. Imagine being able to pay the bills as they came, have money for emergencies, be able to go to the doctor and dentist...

And time. Not having to go to a job that exhausts me and instead having a day that I can do whatever I feel like doing--or doing nothing if that is what I want.

Yup, that would be awesome. May the Lotto gods shine down on us soon! Maybe if I finish my novel, it will be a top seller and I will make a living writing...who knows!

Aliens, revisited

As I said in an earlier post, I am convinced that I get frequent visits from aliens, and that they are having oh-so-much fun doing experiments on me. For the record, I am NOT having oh-so-much fun. I am a mostly sane person, but I am perfectly certain that those little fuckers are messing with me.

1) I sprouted two bumps on my head about 5 years ago, literally overnight. They are on top of my head, like sick little horns trying to grow. I think they are actually some kind of transmitter so the suckers can keep better track of everything I do.

2) I have three moles on my leg that form a perfect isosceles triangle. Each mole is the same size and color. They just appeared one day.

3) Bilateral "ow-ies"--I have had several instances that I will get a boo-boo on the same spot on each hand, or each arm, or each knee, etc, etc, etc. Thing is, I never remember doing anything to get the ouchies in the first place--they are just "there".

4) Crazy-ass, unexplainable dreams. I have these ALL. THE. TIME. Case in point: the recent dream that I will recount for you now...

I dreamed that my father, Bud, and a few other friends and I were going to pick up a very eccentric old lady friend of ours to take out to eat. She lived in a huge mansion with lots of turrets and skylights. She loved birds, and had many wild birds nesting in her home.

We rang the bell, and another friend answered the door. He told us that a stranger had burst in, and then ran out of the house running. Since the stranger had been there, the old woman had disappeared.

We hunted all over for her. While hunting, I noted that there was a next of baby birds up in the rafters that appeared to be orphans. My dad brought a ladder and helped me rescue the birds. While I was rescuing the birds, I heard a thump and turned to see that a huge section of pipe had fallen off of the antique wrought iron stove. We soon realized that the stranger had stuffed the poor old woman into the pipe. It was horrible.

It was at that point in my dream that the birds were now tomatoes, but in my dream, I did not take notice. My father told me to take very good care of them, as they were orphans. Evidently, in the world of my crazy ass dream, tomatoes are where people came from. At some point, all tomatoes morphed into babies. There had even been a documented case where one tomato did not morph until it was 21 years old!

For some reason, we still wanted to take the now dead and pipe-filling old lady with us out to eat, so my dad was having some of the men tie the pipe, with the little old lady still inside, to the side of our bus (our group was so big, we had to ride around in a bus). I, for reasons unknown, had cut open one of the tomatoes and was scooping out the slime and seeds as though I was going to stuff it. A piece fell off into the sink, and I thought, "uh oh, I wonder if the baby will be deformed?" (good grief, I thought about this AFTER I had sliced it wide open???)

I carefully pulled all the wedges back together into the semblance of a tomato, sans one wedge. I carried the tomatoes with me onto the bus.

When we got to our destination, one of my former bosses, BS, appeared, and offered a $1000 prize to the first person who could correctly guess what is the most common start and end time of a shift for the average employee based on a study by the (blah blah blah) personnel group. I had the correct times, but I didn't get the prize, because BS stated that I also had to note that each time correlated to a famous mountain/volcano, one being Vesuvius and the other I don't remember now. Anyhow, I didn't win...

It was then I realized that I had either lost one of the tomatoes, or it had morphed and I just didn't know it....

End of that particular dream.

Are you now thoroughly convinced that aliens are controlling my dreams and trying to drive me insane????

I sometimes dread going to sleep, afraid of what I will dream next. Damn aliens!

Seriously....

I soooooo want to just spend a day in bed. But as soon as 8am rolls around, I start feeling guilty, because I know I have two laid-up adults in the living room waiting for me to change bandages, drain drainage bottles, get their urine-soaked butts out of bed and onto a commode while I change them...pretty much my daily morning routine.

It is 9:30am, and they are both still asleep. I don't dare go back to bed, as they are sure to wake up if I do. Instead, I am sitting here in the frigid kitchen (only room with heat is the living room where Mr. Mike and Ms. Carol sleep) typing a brief update.

We had to drive Ms. Carol to Tuscaloosa during the worst of the freezing rain and sleet--fun times. Her wound just did not look good, so I called the visiting nurse to give it a look-see. The visiting nurse said it was infected; later, the doctor told us it was not. It ended up being a good thing after all, as we were supposed to have her to T-town by 8am this morning to have this procedure done. That meant we would have had to get up at 5am to have her fed and ready to go, and we would have been driving on ice covered roads in the dark. Instead, she had the procedure yesterday, and we were home before it was dark. Not that the roads were a joy, but it could have been worse.

It is still raining this morning, and because the surfaces are so cold and the temp is only 34 degrees, it is freezing as soon as it hits the ground. Due to this fact, the dogs will not go out to pee. Dixie, a feisty Lhasa Apso, took a dump in the kitchen rather than be subjected to the ice cold rain bullets. Can't blame her...

I am turning into a real southern bumpkin. I made jalapeno corn bread last night to go with a pot of chili, and I am making fried chicken livers for supper tonight. Who'd a thunk it? And these people are actually EATING it...go figure. They did pick out the jalapenos from the cornbread, stating it made it too hot. Wimps!

I am heading to Columbus once it warms up to put in a job application with Marriott Hotels International. They just built a Fairfeild Inn, and they are breaking ground for a Courtyard by Marriott. Wish me luck!

Crazy ass dreams last night. Involved petting an android cat until it had kittens, and competing in a dance off on a pre-teen kid's show. My brothers and I were like the Partridge Family or something (yes, I am an old fart who watched the Partridge Family).

Sigh. Carol is up, must get my hiney in caregiver mode.