So...

Sorry about the serious lack of blogging. Well, that is, if anyone is still out there. In my defense, I have plenty of perfectly good excuses - most of which i probably won't get into here. Let me start by saying, it's officially Tax Season. Oh, and in case you're not aware (don't know if I've mentioned it), I'm a tax accountant. So you can imagine the fat one my life is sucking right now.

Also, there have been some health issues in the family this year. Some scary but not serious, some just annoying and some both scary and serious. None that I care to talk about.

On the home front - we got chickens!! We originally purchased 2 silver laced wyandottes, 2 rhode island reds, and 2 barred plymoth rocks. One of the wyandottes died the 2nd day we had them, so we'll have to replace her. We can't have just 1 wyandotte walking around feeling like she's the only one in the world! Imagine how awkward that will be when they hit their teens!! The other 5 seem to be doing quite well. They liked me a lot at first but now they're getting old enough to know they should be scared of me. So I make it a point to hold each one of them at least once a day. We're attempting to become friends. We're bonding. They mostly sit in my hand and stare at me, no doubt trying to figure out what the hell I am. Oh, and they also trying to escape, but not too actively. They live in a big ass rubbermaid container in the spare bedroom right now, so they're close enough that I'll go in there everyday.

Nothing else exciting happening. We've have 2 big snow storms this month. The first one hadn't even melted when the 2nd one dumped about 7 inches of "new snow" on our house Monday night. Needless to say, my Mustang is hopelessly stranded in the snow, so I've been riding to work with Husband. That's making it difficult to be here enough to get my require minimum of 50 billable hours, so I'll probably end up making some of that up this weekend (which should go on next week, not this week). It's confusing, but its the joy of living in a "billable time" world.

Speaking of which - this most certainly isn't billable, so I better get back to work!

Happy - then crappy.

So this morning I hopped on the scale and found myself at -2 pounds. Boo-yah!!

Then I sat thru 2 1/2 hours of team meeting at work - my back hurts, my ass is numb and I'm almost asleep.

Then I logged on and saw that my exam score was finally posted. And I failed it. Miserably.

Fuck.

Tuesday.

Hey! I still exist! What do you know about that. Crazy, huh? So I've made it - thru tax season, thru 5 of my co-workers being fired and 2 managers quitting, thru the Sept. 15th deadline and now we're heading into the October 15th deadline then it will be smooth sailing (HA!) until tax season starts again in about 3 months. Joy.

Since I last posted, work has just been insane and there hasn't been time to turn around much less turn around, sit down, log into blogger and post something. I've been reading and keeping up (for the most part) with my blogroll, but that's been the extent of my accomplishments. I've even been relatively quiet on twitter - and how hard is it to spit out less than 140 characters a couple times a day??

Right now, I'm studying for my 3rd part of the ever-present CPA exam and anxiously awaiting my results on the 2nd part (and getting more than mildly annoyed at how long those results are taking to materialize). I feel certain I didn't pass it, but I want to know, dammit!!

Nothing else is new really. I don't have time for anything but studying at this point, and won't until the Monday before Thanksgiving. Then I'll get a few merciful days off and it will be awesome. But until then, I'm just trying to make time for studying, still trying to cook for my Man *most* nights, trying to keep the house at least liveable, taking care of the guineas, the dogs, the Man, AND being available to help with home improvement projects, etc. Unfortunately, the whole working out thing has fallen by the wayside. And I hate that, but I'm just overwhelmed right now, to say the least.

We have, however, been on a diet for a few weeks now. Well, "diet" isn't really the right word. We're just making better decisions, not eating out, limiting desserts and sweets and fixing healthy stuff for lunches and dinners. So far, I've lost about 9 pounds. And trust me, we've still been out and there has been ice cream consumed (very little, but still). I have a weight that I call the "magic number". Once I got above that number (no, I won't say how much it is), I've never gotten below it. (At the worst point, I was 20 pounds ABOVE that number, about 6 years ago.) I mean, I have been below it, but only by a pound or two and only very briefly. Our diets have always been derailed right about the time I get back down to that number. Perhaps you have that number too. It's so ingrained at this point that I think of my weight in terms of that number.

Let's say the number is 100 pounds (HA-HA-HA), if I get on the scale and weigh 112, I don't think, "I weight 112 pounds", I think "I'm 12 pounds over." And by the same token, if I weigh 98 pounds, I think, "Ooo, I'm down 2 pounds!!" So this morning, I weigh 0. And I'm stoked!! Our diet is going along swimmingly, I don't see any reason it will derail on me and right now I'm at 0, so the only place to go from here is into negative numbers!!

Hopefully one day I'll have a new "magic number". I can imagine in my head what I'd like the next one to be, and the one after that, but I'm not sure what I'd like my Long-Term Magic Number to be. I guess I'll know when (IF) I get there. I feel motivated to exercise now, to speed up my progression toward my new number. Hopefully I'll be able to start working that into the schedule again.

Ok, right now, lunch is over and it's time for me to get back to work.

We put the "labor" in Labor Day

I have to be honest - I'm not really sure what Labor Day is, I'm not sure what we're celebrating. But it's a day when you can take off work and no one minds, so I'm down with it. This year, as usual, we spent our long weekend working way too hard.

My sister and her husband had a get-together on Saturday afternoon. I had big plans to paint something or clean something or something-something before that, but I had a headache Friday night and woke up with it Saturday and accomplished dick on Saturday morning. We went to their house but I had to come home after the food smells permeated the house. Ugh. So the day was a wash.

Still, over the rest of the weekend, we managed to buy ourselves a new kitchen sink (yes, we are slowly rebuilding our entire house) and installed that (I'm a plumber!! And my crack doesn't even hang out!!), then we finished painting the back doors and the hallway. I clipped the chihuahua's nails and we did a ton of laundry (there is still a ton more to do). I also managed to keep up with my studying schedule. The studying seems to be going a lot better for this section of the exam than it did for the other two. I'm not sure if it's the use of the audio cd's - I can listen to them in my car on the way to and from work, which gives me an extra 1 1/2 hrs a day with the material - or if it's just that this stuff is easier than the other stuff. My progress so far is that I failed the first section I took (Business Environment & Concepts, or BEC) and I'm awaiting my scores on the second section (Financial Accounting & Reporting or FAR).

Here's my schedule now:
AUD (Auditing): Friday, October 2nd
BEC (Business Environment & Concepts): Tuesday, October 20th
REG (Regulation): Monday, November 23rd

If I didn't pass FAR (likely) I probably won't be able to retake it until January because December is a dark month (no testing). I can't even begin to express how glad I'll be when this is over.

About the sink replacement - our old sink was stainless steel, nothing wrong with that, but it was only about 6 inches deep. Something majorly wrong with that. You can hardly wash dishes in a sink that shallow and when you rinse them off, the water flies everywhere. But the deal-breaker was when the plumbing under the sink fell apart and I had to use a thing of a dog shampoo and a bottle of Goo-B-Gone to hold the p-trap in place. At that point, we were going to have to re-plumb the thing anyway, right? So we bought this shiny black cast iron (yes, it weighs a billion pounds) Kohler sink - it is a thing of beauty. Every time I walk through the kitchen I stroke it and say, "Hello, Lover"...pretty sure Husband is getting jealous. :-) We debated over faucets and decided to stick with the kind with the separate sprayer, not the attached sprayer. Our faucet is beautiful too - brushed nickle to match the cabinet handles. And it's deep, like 8 or 9 inches (I can't remember) and that part is the most wonderful of all!! I'm so tickled with this sink, I'll have to post pics of it soon.

Here's what I've learned...

You can't start running with a weak powerhouse. Oh, and the woman on the Pilates video is a she-devil, in the most evil sense of the word.

Any attempts at running and/or fast walking, have been thwarted by back pain, brought on by weak abs, etc. So I thought to myself, "Self, let's do some pilates with our heavy bag routines and build up those core muscles (the "powerhouse"), THEN we'll worry about running." Besides, more muscle = more fat burning. Friday night we did some pilates. The bitch...er...lady on the DVD said that I should start with 5 or 6 (out of 18) of the exercises and then work up to doing the entire routine. So that's what I (attempted to do) did. Keep in mind - I have no mat and I'm working on a HARDwood floor. I had to skip one move because "roll like a ball" doesn't happen on a HARDwood floor with no mat. Not when my tailbone is involved. No way, no how.

Anyway, I did 5 or 6 of her moves...after a while, when the blood was gone from my brain and my tailbone was screaming in pain and the dog was licking my face while I attempted unnatural acts on the living room floor (with my pelvis in "neutral position" and my spine in alignment)...I lost count. I actually didn't stop because of my muscles, I stopped because after one move that was done on my stomach, when I sat up to do the next move, my head started pounding in a way that I was certain...certain...would be the end of me and I had to stop. All the while, that smiling, blonde harbinger of death was on my television screen bending and flexing and stretching and smiling. God, I hate that woman.

In the end, I thought, Well, maybe pilates isn't for me. I guess I can't do enough of that to help because of the inexplicable pounding in my head. But...turns out I was wrong. Turns out it really is the quality of your movements and not the quantity. And I guess I really was holding everything in and flexing and whatever I was supposed to be doing because my powerhouse killed all day Saturday. It hurt yesterday too but not nearly as bad and today I can only tell anything happened when I suck it all in and flex those muscles. So I guess I was doing something right. The only thing I'm wondering now is if I should have done it again yesterday, since the pain was fading or if I should have waited until today when the pain is almost all gone. I'm definately doing more tonight - it was awesome! And to finally do something so quick and simple that left me with such soreness that it MUST have done something - that's awesome too. Now I just need a mat, before my tailbone stages a revolt.

In other news, I'm still studying, my next part of the exam is next Thursday (August 20th) and Husband worked until midnight Friday night, then went in at 8:30am Saturday and got home about 6pm, so I got caught up on my studying and I put a coat of primer on the hallway. We finished the woodwork yesterday and put a topcoat on the walls, so just one more coat on the walls and that'll be another area of the house painted...sweet.

Quickie

Don't have much time here cause I only have an hour left in this day and it is essential that I accomplish...something. But, I wanted to give you and update.

Got home last night (35 minutes LATE because of a stupid traffic jam!!) and threw a couple chicken breasts in the oven. Then I studied for about 20 minutes. Then I did the strength training routine! I actually did it. I know that's not impressive really, but before I can accomplish (fail at) anything, I have to start it. So step one: starting - check! I was only able to do the minimum recommended reps of each movement, which was 8 (except the tourture-crunches...the kind where you lay on your back, put your knees in the air and straighten and lower one leg as your crunch...yeah, I did 4 on each side and prayed for death). Oh, and the calf thingies - raising up on one foot, hold, lower slowly, I did 10 of those and then 10 more on both feet. Guess my calves are pretty strong after packing all this ass around for so long. When I got finished, I was hot and tired and semi-sweaty and achy feeling. This morning, my legs were a bit sore, but not much and it's gone now. So I'm thinking I didn't really push myself hard enough. I'm not accustomed to pushing myself physically (except when doing yard work, in which case I always over-do it and hurt myself) so I have to figure out how to dig deep and make myself do more than I think I'm capable of.

Afterward, I continued to study until Husband got home, then we fixed homemade chicken burritos (YUM) and took a walk around the yard after dinner. Got 4 more tomatoes, a handful of green beans and a cucumber from the garden. 4 canteloupes are very close to ripe too - exciting!

So tonight is the heavy bag routine. I plan to try to figure out what a good time limit is, so I can say I start with ____ minutes and work up from there. I try to stay light (HA) on my feet and move around a lot to get some extra cardio out of it. First - I have to figure out how to wrap my hands!!

I can't stand...

*bloggers who think they are the shit and who won't hesitate to spend an entire post telling you how wonderful they are. Gag.

*when people say "See ya" or "Later" instead of goodbye on the phone. This applies especially when it is someone they don't know and who they will most likely never see and/or talk to again. Just dumb.

*not being able to shake that groggy feeling. My eyes are rolling up in my head and I can barely stay awake. I was this way ALL day yesterday. Suck.

*traffic jams. It took me an hour and 15 minutes to get to work this morning, when it usually takes 40 minutes. Aaarrrggghhh. I was very angry. I don't know how many times I've forbidden people to have accidents, close roads, etc, etc, etc where I'm trying to drive.

*when my office mate decides he wants to have a conversation with me. Granted, this hardly ever happens. But today, when I'm super groggy and trying to study (at work ~ with permission ~ because I have no actual work to do ~ SWEET) he decides he wants to discuss refinancing and mortgage rates and all that shit. Please, for the love of god, just shut the fuck up.

Ok ~ now that I have all that off my chest (and I feel a lot better thankyouverymuch), I can tell you what's up with the running/working out stuff. I talked to Husband about it and he's on board (yay!), so we're going to clean out the basement (hopefully very soon) and put his stuff down there from his room and we're going to bring the heavy bag upstairs and put it in the spare bedroom. Then we found a workout bench thingy - kind of like a bowflex but WAY less expensive. We're going to buy that and put that in there too. That will be the workout room, which is a step in the right direction for me to have a space dedicated to that. The only time in my life I've worked out regularly was when I had a space, just for that, in our old house.

This week there is a fair in Husband's hometown and next week is the fair in the town where we live, so we'll be going to those a few nights and I still have to keep up with my studying (having this time to study at work is invaluable this week!!) AND I need to clean the house, take care of the guineas, clean their house, and get the laundry and stuff caught up. But, somewhere in there, I hope to find time to get everything situated and start the new routine on Monday. That's the current goal, we'll see how we do.

Need suggestions here

As you might have guessed, I'm not expert when it comes to fitness (if you knew me in RL, you would know just how much of an understatement that really is). So, I have a tentative plan for starting out here and I need suggestions from those of you who know what you're talking about (and any level of "knowing" will trump me...so chime in!)

Here's what I'm thinking for the first couple weeks:

Monday - strength training
Tuesday - heavy bag (time yet to be determined - I want to push myself, but not kill myself and I'm honestly not sure where that line is yet)
Wednesday - off or a light walk/run to keep up the momentum
Thursday - strength training
Friday - heavy bag
Saturday - strength training
Sunday - same as Wednesday

So...my questions are, so I need to do the strength training more frequently for it to make improvements? Should I combine it and the heavy bag on the same night? Or should I do the heavy bag first rather than the strength stuff (by strength training, I'm meaning dips and push ups and things like that). Do I need those "off" nights or will that hurt more than help?

It's clearly going to be a learning process for me - to see what I am capable of and what my body will stage a revolt against. I intend to start off kind of light, but enough to push myself so I make progress. I will be finding the line between "making progress" and "hurting myself" and no one can really tell me where that line is except my own body. (I'm sure it won't hesitate to let me know!!)

For this weekend, the steps I'll be taking in the right direction are to clean out the room in the basement where my heavy bag goes and to get it set up. The ducks were in there when they stayed in the house so it looks pretty much like what you're picturing right now. So I'll be cleaning out the cedar chips and the duck poop and bleaching the concrete and then scrubbing off the nasty bleach smell with some kind of pleasant smelling cleaner. Then I'll get my heavy bag put up (with help from K, of course) and all that.

Monday will start my new life, so I need to get ready!!

Here it is.

So I say to Husband last night, "So, you wanna run a marathon?" to which He replies, "Um, not right now." Gotta love him. Then I told him about my plan and he says, "How are you going to do that with studying and everything?" I didn't really expect resistance from that angle, but that just made me more determined because it's not impossible to do this, but it does kind of seem impossible.

The new master plan for the blog (and for my life, really) is to run a marathon. I haven't set a date and said, "I'm going to run X marathon on X date" which is probably what I should do, but that seems huge. So I'm going to run a 5k first...gotta start small. I know that I need to start that small because I found a 5 week training program for a 5k race and there's no way I can do that yet. I'm so out of shape it isn't even funny. So my current goal is to work my way up to starting the 5k training. I figure it'll take about a month. I'm going to start with the heavy bag tonight - basically working on stamina (with hopeful upper arm improvements!).

I'm going to try for a 5week pre-training training program. There will be heavy bag workouts and run/walks and I found a general strength training program that seems like a good idea. I need to get a reasonable schedule worked out - both to keep this realistic (it's not like the CPA exam just disappeared or anything) and because I just function better with a schedule (hence, the studying schedule). Once I get a schedule worked out, I'll post it here and we'll go from there.

I will have beginning numbers (weight, measurements, etc) but the overwhelming shame will not allow me to post those here - not just yet. Once I'm far enough away from those numbers, I'll tell you what they were, but not until they're a thing of the past. Besides, losing weight or being thin or whatever isn't my goal here. My goal is to pick something I want to do, something I could totally accomplish if I put my mind to it and am committed to it, and DO THAT THING. If I drop a bunch of weight and become a total hottie in the process - BONUS.

A plan

I finally have a plan for this blog. Sort of. More than just random ramblings about nothing in particular. Don't get me wrong - those will still be here - but there will also be a more grand purpose to the thing. We'll be going somewhere with this, you see. I'm going to do something. And I'm going to document it.

Earth shattering, right? You're glad you waited all this time for me to come up with that (completely original) idea...right?

And here's the best part...I don't know what it's going to be yet. I don't know what I'll be documenting. I haven't been inspired. I can't decide if I want to start small...so something every day for a week, let's say. Or maybe for a month and see how that goes. Can I keep it up? Can I blog about it? Will it mean anything? Or should I just start out with a whole year. That seems huge.

I know I don't have many readers on here yet so I'm not going to bother with setting up a poll cause I feel certain I wouldn't get many responses. But I'm going to throw some ideas I have out here and let them bounce around and see if anyone has anything to say about them. Maybe it'll just help me decide all on my own.

Ideas for a week (to potentially be extended to a month or longer):
~Eat an apple before each meal.
~Do a cleansing/detox type diet
~Do something creative every day (and actually post pics of the results)
~Have sex every day (I've also thought of this one as 365 times in a year/31 times in a month but not necessarily every single day....make sense?)

One idea I had for a longer goal-type thing was to run a mini-marathon next summer. I mean, it would be awesome to run in the New York City marathon in 2010, but being able to run 26 miles in a little over a year when I can't even run down my driveway right now, might be a touch unreasonable. Of course, unreasonable does NOT equal undoable or impossible. So, we'll see. And I've always wanted to be a runner.

Hump Day

You know, having to work sucks sometimes and being independently wealthy would win out over working for a living any day. Guess I should start playing the lottery if I ever expect to live out my lifelong dreams of sloth and gluttony.

I announced to Husband the other night that once I pass my CPA and we get some money saved up, I'm going to go back to school to become a nurse. I believe he thinks I've lost my mind completely this time. But I've had these nurse fantasies (not like that!!) for a long time now, so I think I'll go for it. It's never too late to have dreams, I suppose. Of course...does it make sense to aspire to a career with worse hours and lower pay than the career I have now? I suppose not. Maybe I'll just become a candy striper after I retire. ;-)

I'm having trouble staying (getting) motivated today. Lord knows I have enough work to do, they keep piling it on ad nauseum, but I just don't feel like doing it. I want to go home and...oh, I don't know....chillax?? :-) Actually, I'd like to be studying right now - that would at least feel like I was accomplishing something. I never thought I'd get into the whole CPA exam thing, but I'm totally obessessed with it. I don't want to do anything except study. At all. Until I'm finished. Husband complains about how much I study and wants to know why I didn't take a break between tests, or why I have to study EVERY NIGHT FOR SIX WEEKS. Because I want to be done with this test, you know? I don't want to take it 15 times, I don't want to half-ass it and drag it out forever. I want to study hard now, learn this shit and be done. I want to pass all 4 parts on the first try. Who knows if I will (or if I have) but I want to, and not studying will not facillitate that. It's hard to explain this kind of obessession to someone who is not experiencing it, and even harder to ask them to be understanding about it.

Tests, animals, life.

I'm back. Took some time off and had a lot of catching up to do at work yesterday, so no time for blogging. Wednesday was my first part of the CPA exam...BEC...Business Environment and Concepts. Lots of crap about partnerships, s-corps, c-corps, stocks, bonds, present value of money, information technology, international markets, etc, etc, etc. It's kind of the random-crap section of the exam. I sincerely hope I passed it, not just because I have a fear of failure, but also because if I have to study that boring ass shit again, I'll probably have to hurt someone. Then Thursday, Friday and Saturday we took a little trip to celebrate our anniversary. Saturday we came home, gathered the dogs, then grilled out some veggies for dinner and set off fireworks in the front yard. It was fun and I look forward to buying even more explosives next year!! Oddly enough, it is legal to buy the big fireworks in our state, but illegal to actually set them off. Needless to say, we ignored that last part of the law.

Saturday was our anniversary. We've been married 11 years. I keep saying that and it keeps blowing my mind. It is amazing how young we were when we got together and when we got married and how we've managed to stay together. So much shit has gone down since we got married, not just with us, but with all the people in our wedding. Let's look at my bride's maids. One of them had a baby, got married and had another baby (in that order), another one came out of the closet and lives happily with her girlfriend, another one got married and divored twice, got married again and had a baby, and the fourth one had a baby and got divorced. Then there's the groomsmen. The best man had a baby, got divorced, then married a woman who already has 4 kids. Another one had triplets, one had 2 kids and the fourth got divorced and is now a musician. That's a whole lot of crap happening, lots of marriages and divorces and babies for 8 people!! And what have we done? Well, no divorces or babies here. We did move to another city, finish college, got real jobs, moved again...out of state that time. And then of course, there were all manner of interesting developments and things changing...as I think you'd expect when two people essentially grow up together. I mean, I was only 18 and a month out of high school when we started dating. And now I'm 31 years old. Geez.

At work, my office mate is back. Yuck. I got used to having my own office (he was gone for a month...he's an auditor and they spend a lot of time in the field). As it turns out, I really took to talking to myself while he was gone too, so I've had to get that in check. And I got used to listening to my iPod too, but I can't do that with him in here either. But the good news is that he's here this week then gone again next week. Sweet.

At home, all is well. I'm studying again for the 2nd part of the exam which is scheduled for August 20th. This one is FAR - Financial Accounting and Reporting. I'm trying to get the house cleaned too, I accomplished the kitchen this weekend, that's been about it. Maybe tonight I'll knock out a bathroom or something. However, after the duck tragedies and the baby deer and all that sadness, my faith in the Disney cartoon status of our property has been restored. Sunday I went in the laundry room to hang something up and I looked out the window and there was a deer and 3 babies!! Triplets are very, very rare for deer so it was amazing. I yelled for Husband to come look and we stood at the window watching them. There is a patch in the middle of our front yard that contains our burn pile. We haven't had an opportunity to burn it and the grass/weeds have grown up around it. The fawns used it like a race track and chased each other in circles around it. It was hilarious!! The mother just stood watching them and eating grass, very calm. They moved over near the woods and we went on the back porch and watched them a while longer (they were kind of beside the house at that point). Finally they went into the woods. I took some pictures and will share them as soon as I can sweet-talk Husband into uploading them from the camera. Then this morning, I stepped out on the front porch and 5 deer ran across the driveway. They must have been grazing in the front yard and I startled them and they scampered off into the long grass in the field next to us. Not to sound like a big dork, but it was pretty magical. I mean, they're such beautiful creatures and for them to feel safe enough to just graze and hang out and bring their babies out so close to our house is pretty cool. So this morning's count was 5 deer, 1 indigo bunting and 1 baby bunny (we're overrun with bunnies...want some??)

So what's the deal here anyway?

It is truly a joy to write things, real things about your life, or from your imagination, when the people who are going to read them are either complete strangers or are those rare, special, wonderful, kindred spirits who will not judge you and will continue to really want you in their lives no matter what might jump off your fingertips and onto the keyboard. When you get done writing something for an audience like that, your soul feels lighter, you feel happy. So this thought leads me to wonder why I have this blog. Sure, I can ramble on about farm/tractor/guinea/duck/dog stuff for days and you can't say anything because I warned you that's what this was going to be like. But does that stuff really weigh on me and want to be dumped here? Not really. It's just life stuff, just sharing experiences. Which is cool too, but have never really been the thing that has compelled me to write. There are a couple of you here that know understand what I'm getting at here.

Also, I think I've attracted some new readers to this blog and when I look back at it with fresh eyes, I realize you know nothing about me really. And how interesting can guinea fowl tales be from a person you know nothing about?? So for this post, a mini-bio. I'm going to keep this semi-annoymous, but you'll get the basics.

I grew up on a 200 acre farm. We had lots of animals - cows, horses, a donkey, guinea fowl, ducks, geese, hamsters, dogs, cats, etc. We grew corn, tobacco, and bell peppers. We lived there until I was 12 years old. Then we moved "into town" which was 6 acreas about 5 miles from town. My parents lived there until about 5 years ago, I think. I met Husband the day before I graduated from high school. Our first date was July 4, 1996 and we got married July 4, 1998. 11 years ago this coming Saturday. I was 20 years old when we got married. So how I'm only 29 now, after being married 11 years is a bit of a mystery, I'll admit. We bought a house a couple months before we got married and lived there for 3 years. In 2001 Husband lost his job and we ended up moving away - to the "big city" - where he found a new job. I was not happy about leaving my home town, but now I think it was the best thing we could have done. We lived in a neighborhood in a mid-sized town (a little over 200,000 people I think). We both went to school during that time (while working full-time) and got our degrees. After Husband graduated, we decided to move out into the country - 2 1/2 hours from where we lived. So we fixed up our house, sold it in October 2008, quit our jobs, left all of our friends, co-workers and favorite restaurants behind, bought a new house and moved to where we live now. We own a little over 4 acres and sit in the middle of 16 acres all owned by the same people - we hope to buy it all someday.

Here's a few random tidbits, then I gotta get back to work. The first grade was by far the worst year of my life. I had the chicken pox twice that year, even though that "isn't possible." I burned my hand on an iron bad enough that I was off school a couple days and the pain was still so bad when I went back (with my hand a giant ball of gauze) that it made me dizzy. My paternal grandmother died in October of that year. On February 1 (my parents' anniversary) my dad, sister & I were in a car accident. My dad still suffers from his injuries. I ate the radio knob and knocked out my only adult tooth. Then my paternal grandfather died on February 7th (I think). I have been put to sleep 6 times in my life. Once to have that tooth put back in and braces sewn into my gums, then to have the braces taken out, then to have the tooth itself taken out (3 or 4 years later), then to have my gallbladder taken out in 2003 and twice for oral surgery in 2003 & 2004 (I think). I once went to a psychiatrist named Clovis Augustus (first & middle names), and one who told me that I could never tell anyone I'd ever seen a shrink as it would make people think less of me (I was about 14 at that time). I've been medicated for everything from depression to bipolar disorder to severe anxiety. I haven't taken any of that stuff in over 7 years and I don't intend to ever again. I feel like Husband and our marriage are the great miracles of my life - it is what I am most proud of.

Monday - or, Thursday, as it were

So it's another Monday and yet, I don't entirely hate this one because I only have to work 2 days this week. We were supposed to go out to lunch today with a girl who used to work here but moved away - she's back in town today. But I'm not going, instead I'm going to stay here and study. It's what I should do, so I'm doing it.

The weekend went fairly ok, just not long enough as usual. Friday night we went to the in-laws' and worked on the guinea coop, then we ate dinner and played some pinochle. We were there into the wee hours of the morning (ok, it was midnight, but it felt really late!) Saturday we got up and Husband went to help them load up the guinea coop parts to bring to our house for final assembly. I stayed home and cleaned the house, did some laundry and studied. When they got there, I went down and helped with assembly. It was 500,000 degrees (95) outside, so we worked until about 2:30pm, then stopped cause it was blisteringly hot. The in-laws went home and we took showers and went out to dinner and stopped at Wal-Mart for some essentials (gas can for diesel for the tractor, windshield wiper blades, car washing soap, paint for the guinea house & cheap brush (since its going to be red and will likely ruin the brush cause of the rough wood), and various other goodies). Then I studied for a bit and around 6pm, when that side of the house was in the shade, we got back to work on the coop. It is 8' x 4' and has plywood sides and back, a metal roof and a wire front and bottom. We covered the inside of the bottom with vinyl stuff and a couple piecs of paneling that we'll leave there at least until they can get up on the roost (which is a wooden 8ft. closet rod). There are also a couple pieces of paneling in the front to protect them (they sleep with their faces up against that wire and a racoon will reach in and kill them just for fun) and to keep some heat in. Anyway, we got it done Saturday night and it was supposed to storm, so we left them in the basement and moved them out there Sunday. They move around a little and are eating and everything, but they are clearly still freaked out about being outside (where they can hear dogs barking and who knows what else). They can't get up on their perch yet, or they haven't figured out that they can, so they're still huddling on the floor and sitting on their feeder. Of course, it dropped down into the 50's last night, which is the coldest night we've had in a month or two so when I went down to feed them this morning, they mostly gave me dirty looks. I put a cardboard box in there on its side so for them, they can get in that and snuggle together to get warmer if they want (once they stop being afraid of it). Also, they might use it as a step up onto their perch. Hopefully after a full day of sunshine and no dogs or people looking in on them every 5 minutes, they'll relax and explore their new house some more.

So I have to work today and tomorrow, then Wednesday is my big test. I took some practice tests over the weekend and I'm pretty sure I will not pass this section. But at least I'll get a feel for the experience and I'll know better how to study for future sections. It's a very expensive learning experience, but a learning experience none the less. And who knows, maybe I'll get lucky. Stranger things have happened. Even though it is so close, I will still spend tonight and tomorrow night doing practice questions and trying to drill that last tiny bit of information into my brain that might be the difference between passing and failing. Then, on Thursday, we will drop the chihuahua with my in-laws, take the big girls to the kennel and head off on our little anniversary get-away. Our 11th wedding anniversary is this coming Saturday (yes, we got married on the 4th of July), so we're staying at a cabin for 2 nights in a little town about 2 hours away. Not a big deal, just a little break from the ordinary.

Not much else happening. I have a tomato from the garden ripening on the window sill and several more getting near ripe on the vine. Maybel has several berries in the works, but 2 that will be eaten before we leave Thursday. Our squash plants have ceased producing anything edible - not sure what the problem is. I just keep pulling off the rotten or woody fruits and hoping for something delicious soon. We have 5 watermelons coming on our single plant - our entire family will be eating watermelons soon!! We're also expecting a bumper crop of cantelopes - I hope everyone we know loves them!! I think I'm going to have a bunch of lima beans too, which means I need to look up when to pick them and how to store them - I've only ever had them out of a can!

"...and I liked it."

I'm so stinking happy these days I make myself sick. Husband and I are getting along really well, I'm happy with our house, I'm excited about getting the duck/guinea shelter done and moving them outside, I'm feeling positive about my exam that's coming up, I'm excited about our anniversary trip next week, I'm satisfied with my job right now. You don't understand how unusual this is. My entire life I've been the poster child for Emo kids. But right now, even with my moodiness and unusual amounts of anger (you should try being cheerful-angry sometime, its really weird), overall, I'm practically fucking giddy. This is probably known as "manic", not "happy", but I'll take what I can get. :-) Whatever this mood is, I just hope it lasts. Like, forever.

Last night when I got home I straightened up the house a little (very little) then we went and met my sister, her husband and Katie (our niece) for dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant. The service was awful, which has never been the case before, but isn't that always the way when you take someone to a place you swear is good? Then they came to our house to see the guineas and the ducks. They are all getting so big, my sister wanted to see them before they were full grown. Katie is now afraid of our dogs, just cause she hasn't seen them since she's been more aware of what's going on. Last time she was at our house (in April) she thought they were funny. Now they're scary. Hopefully she'll change her mind again. She didn't seem too impressed by the birds, probably because she doesn't really know what they are. She did watch the ducks in the pool though and seemed amused by that.

After last night though, its completely official that my BIL is a total (I mean - TOTAL) city boy. I'm pretty sure he was afraid of the guineas, probably because they look kind of mean and have pointy curved beaks. But they're just babies, and still cute! Soon they will lose the feathers on their heads and will look more like vultures. I'm sure he won't come within a mile of them then. Honestly, I think he was scared of the ducks too, which is hilarious to me. My sister ran right out there and grabbed a duck, no hesitation. I mean, they're almost still ducklings!! But he backed away and wouldn't let Katie touch it. In a way I think its funny, but in another way I'm afraid he isn't going to let her come stay with us when she's older because I get the feeling like he thinks we're irresponsible and that our house is a death trap. I could be way wrong, but that's the impression I get and even though I don't have kids or anything, I'd never let something happen to that little girl and it hurts my feelings a little bit. But then again, given our lack of kids and all the things around our house that he's uncomfortable with, I guess I can't really blame him.

Well, I'm not going to the charity thing tonight. Between the duck/guinea house, the lawn needing to be mowed, and the studying I have to do, I just don't have an entire evening that I can give up right now. So I told her I can't go, I'll just have to catch the next event. I'm sure she's not very happy about it, but right now I have a lot going on and I need more than 1 day notice when I'm going to have to surrender an entire evening to something. That's just how it is right now. Husband and I are meeting for lunch today and I'll tell him then that I'm not going, I think he'll be pretty happy.