Just Simply Holly

It’s been YEARS since my step father looked at my mother and told her he’d never forgive my husband for something that didn’t even affect his life (my step fathers). I’ve dealt with it for so long that I don’t even give it a second thought about it most of the time. But yesterday, while talking to my husband about the funeral I have to attend tomorrow, he turned and looked at me and asked, “I’m won’t be allowed to attend, will I?”. And then it hit me, for the first time in a LONG time, why can’t he just let it go? Not my husband, my stepfather.

So, I made the obligatory phone calls to the people that would know, they said they’d make a few phone calls and get back with me in a few minutes. And while I was waiting I got angry, REALLY angry! The thought of saying goodbye to Del tomorrow and not having my husband there for support made me angrier than I’ve been in quite some time! And if he couldn’t be there, it would be because of a “man” who knew Del for one hell of a lot less time than I did, and someone who never had a care or concern about Del either. I was stewing and was tempted to find some Callaway irons, so that if they did tell me my husband wasn’t going to be able to be there for me, I could pound them to a pulp.

Then the phone rang, and what I heard almost made me drop the phone. The words were “There won’t be a single problem with him being there”. Guess I can put the clubs away now…LOL

OK, that’s it, I’m DONE! Seriously, how is asking your teenaged children to clean up after themselves such a bad thing? I don’t ask them to mop the floors or clean the toilets, I just ask them to pick up their rooms and anything else that they get out in other areas of the house. But with the way they act about it, you’d swear I’m asking them to scrub the floors with a toothbrush or something.

A couple of weeks ago I helped my daughter get her room cleaned up, it was just a gross and disgusting mess and I had tried everything to get her to clean the mess up on her own before I finally offered to get in there and help her. It took us a few hours, but we cleaned that room ceiling to floor and it looked GOOD! When we were done, I set down a few basic rules, no eating in her room, no drinking unless it’s bottled water and keep it picked up.

I finally got around to hanging her new blinds today and when I moved the bed away from the window I about fell over from what I seen. Under her bed were dirty dishes, food wrappers and dirty clothes. So when I was done I came out and told her to get in there and get it picked up. Of course, she tried the “I don’t know how that stuff got in there” line, to which I told her that if she wanted to be in even more trouble than she was to keep it up, so she zipped her lip.

Honestly, if I were in my right mind, I’d pack my stuff up, hire a New York Moving Company and high tail it out of here. Everything lately is an argument and I’m really tired of everyone’s attitudes, hubby included. There is NOTHING difficult about putting your dirty glass or plate in the sink and bringing your dirty clothes out to the laundry room, unless you ask my family to do it. I just need to pack and go, then maybe they’ll realize how tired of all of this I really am! Anyone looking for a room mate?

I expected things to be a little rough when I got home from my trip. I knew that it would be an adjustment for me after spending Monday hopping planes and changing time zones 3 times. I knew it would be an adjustment on my husband and kids after not having me around for 8 days. And I had seen the weather forecast so I was prepared for the heat wave that is currently in my area, well, as prepared as you can be….LOL. I had the hubby get the A/C units from the shed put in the night before last, and it’s a good thing I did because we hit 89 degrees yesterday with 65% humidity.

We may have ruined my printer, however. Out here in the family room the windows slide to the side rather than up and down. One of the windows is obscured with the TV and entertainment center, so putting a window A/C unit there simply wasn’t an option. That left the window here by my desk. It wasn’t a problem, I didn’t mind it being put here because I knew if I got cold I could simply put a sweatshirt on. But we had to put something underneath it from the outside to prop it up and keep it from falling out of the window. When we did that we gave the unit just the slightest of a tilt forward. Neither my husband or myself thought that much about it until a couple of hours later when I noticed a puddle by my desk. As I got to looking I discovered that not only was there water by my desk, there was also water under my printer stand and all over my printer. We quickly unhooked it to asses the damage. Originally, we didn’t think it had gotten into the actual printing unit, and after letting it sit overnight I went to hook it back up yesterday. It was only then that I realized exactly how water logged my printer actually was. As I lifted the lid to check the scanner area I seen that the entire area under the glass was filled with water.

It sat on it’s side over night and I’m hoping the rest of the water has drained out, but I haven’t touched it yet. I really don’t want to have to replace this right now because I don’t have the extra $100+ to do so. This week is bill week and between what my husband has coming in and what I have coming in, we’ll make the bills and have a little left over for grceries. UGH! I’m ready to go back to California….LOL!

I have worked in the customer service industry on and off for most of my adult life, I know and realize how important it is to be polite when you are trying to help a customer and that you have to be careful about how you word things so that what you’re saying doesn’t come across as offensive, especially when the problem is on your end and not the customers end!

I have memberships at a several different game sites, some where the games are played strictly online, some where the games are strictly for download. Since getting my new Dell back in February I hadn’t had any problems with any of the games I’ve played or downloaded, that was until I downloaded a new game last week. I have what I would consider an AWESOME system here! It has 3 GB of memory, a 300GB hard drive and an AMD 64×2 dual core processor. That has been more than sufficient to run Vista and every other program I’ve ran since getting this computer. I’m also VERY careful with my computer and don’t visit questionable websites and I run my antivirus and anti spyware programs regularly.

So I was a bit surprised to find that this game that I downloaded this week lagged to badly, it was almost impossible to play it. I contacted the site where I had the membership in hopes of some suggestions from them and instead I received a reply that caused me to cancel my membership with their site! They wanted me to download and run a program that would tell them what types of spyware and viruses my computer might have and they also tried to tell me that it was possible that I didn’t have enough dell memory to run the game. But I pointed out to them that the specs for the game itself stated that only 128MB of ram was necessary for the game and that I had that amount times 12! They then replied back asking my to download and run a program that would tell if my computer had been “hijacked”.

At that point, I was done! I had a game that I paid for that was not capable of running correctly on a system that went far beyond what their stated “requirements” for running the game were and rather than offer to compensate me they want me to run tons of diagnostics and download programs that are not necessary? Especially when this is the ONLY game I have ever had a problem with. But I think the fact that them telling me 3GB of memory might not be enough to run the game was what sent me over the top! Not one time did they even say they were sorry that I was having problems, it was my fault from the beginning.

Oh well, I guess it’s time to find another game site, does anyone have any suggestions?

You’d have thought with sunshine and warmer weather that this would have been a great weekend for me. Especially after having such an awesome day with the kids yesterday! But with the problems that we’re having with our router and the fact that for some reason that both the hubby and I have been grumpier than heck, today honestly hasn’t been the most pleasant of days. On top of that, I feel physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted! Now I see the reasons and advantages as to why people build their own home gyms, it would definitely help with stress and frustrations and is much more convenient that having to get things around to go to the gym. I wonder if there is anyone out there that would consider trading gym equipment for my hubby? LOL

The kids and I had a TOTALLY awesome day! My hubby got called into work this morning and worked until 10:30 tonight, so it was just me, the kids and the dogs today. We had an amazing day with almost no arguments! The kids decided that they wanted to get some fresh air and since it was sunny they went outside. I looked out the slider door to see where they were at and managed to catch them on the trampoline jumping and laughing, so I decided to try and sneak some pictures of them. I was able to snap a few pictures before they caught me, once they seen what I was doing it became a “free for all” to see who could do the coolest “trick” for me to take a picture of. In

After the first set of photos were taken we came inside to upload them to the computer and see how they turned out. Some of them were awesome, some managed to capture the funniest captions on the kids’ faces and some made us laugh until we were crying. After looking through the first set of pictures, the kids wanted to go back out so that I could take some more, they wanted to do cooler tricks and make funnier faces. They ended up going in and out of the house several times and in all I ended up taking over 100 pictures of them, most of them being “action” shots where they were in mid air or doing a flip or something.

When they had had enough of the cold weather (although it was sunny, it was only 35 degrees tops today), they came in and we made some hot cocoa and looked through all of the pictures again. We made some dinner, did the dishes and chilled out for the rest of the evening.

Out of the middle of nowhere I lost my internet connection, I still was connected to the network betwee the 3 computers, but I had no internet. The other three computers all had internet, but not mine. I tried restarting my computer thinking tat would help, but it didn’t. I tried to do a system restore on the computer to back it up a day, but for some reason it wouldn’t do the restore. I tried restarting the modem, that didn’t work. By the time my husband got home from work I was almost in freak out stage. I had no idea what was going on or what to do about it, and I’ve never not been able to diagnose and/or fix computer problems.

Finally we got the bright idea to just plug my computer directly into the modem and amazingly, for the first time in a few hours, I had an internet connection. That was good news, but it was also bad news because it meant that our ever so faithful router was probably taking a dump on us, and right now we just cannot afford to replace it. So hubby got to “tinkering” with things (since that’s what he’s best at). After playing the “Old Switcheroo” with some of the wires and powering the router off for a while, we seem to have the problem fixed. But the reality is that we’re going to have to replace our router ASAP! It’s OLD, and by old I mean that it is easily 6 years old, and I’m not exactly sure what the life span of a wired router is.

I did make use of my time without internet, in between freaking out and yelling…LOL! I took some of the pictures of the kids that I shot today and put them to music. So, for your viewing pleasure……

I love my hubby, I really do! He’s a great man who really does put up with my many different sides and mood swings! Take this morning, for instance. He decided to be nice and let me sleep in since he “Oh so rudely” woke me up shortly after 5:00 AM yesterday morning. Now, normally this would be a VERY nice thing! But this morning he failed to realize that some how one of the dogs had managed to get my glasses off my desk and that all three of them were using my glasses as their newest chew toy.

So, whether I want to or not, I have no choice but to purchase new glasses ASAP! I can’t afford them right now, but hopefully can get them at some point in the next week. Fortunately I do still have my last pair and can wear them for driving and stuff. But the prescription is very different from those and my newest ones, so I foresee MAJOR headaches until I can replace them.

On top of waking up to finding the dogs chewing on my glasses I also discovered that my computer would not start. We still haven’t figured out what the problem was, it took 5 tries before it finally did start. So to say the least, it wasn’t the best of mornings at all. I have a horrible headache and a TON of homework to do and all I want to do is take a nap…LOL!

The past couple of days have just been SOOOOOOOOOOO stressed out! The migraine I had Thursday really messed me up and just threw my whole week off, it also caused me to miss two classes, which REALLY stinks!

Yesterday my plan was to get things around to start getting our income taxes ready. No, I can’t quite do them yet because I’m waiting on some 1099’s as well as the statements for hubby and I from school. But with what I had, and guesstimating the numbers from the things I’m waiting on, it looks like we’re not going to be getting the refund we were hoping for this year.

At one point yesterday I was on a website with a flashing ad for Vegas hotel rates and all I could think about was just running away from everything that was stressing me out! But, I know things will be OK, they might not be what we hoped they would, but I have no doubt we’ll be fine! Or at least they will be if I stop playing on the puter and get my homework done…LOL

WOW, I’m still sitting here thinking that some of the things that happened yesterday really couldn’t have happened!  I’ll give you the details of my Tuesday, but be warned, it will be LONG!

I had class yesterday morning at 8:00 AM.  Now, I knew that when I enrolled in this class that it was going to be a close call making it to class some days.  But I worked things out so that rather than taking my daughter to her bus stop, waiting for the bus, then waiting for the bus to leave after she has gotten on it, like I normally do, I instead leave when the bus is the next “vehicle” from the driveway that I wait in.  This allows me plenty of time to get over to the main road and hop on the turnpike.  As much as I dislike having to pay to drive on a road, taking the turnpike to school in the mornings cuts about 20 minutes off the drive, so in my opinion it’s worth the 50 cents it costs. Read more…

As you may or may not know, we got a pretty good snow/ice storm over the weekend, specifically Saturday night into Sunday.   We ended up with an average of about 8 inches of snow in the area.  But the worst part is that there is ice under the snow.  My husband drives major expressways to work, he just called saying all of the main roads are still in horrible condition.  The local news is also all over the area stressing how bad the roads are, how there is a layer of ice under the snow and even some areas with black ice.

By dinner time last night a huge amount of schools had already delayed for today, some of them had even closed.  My daughters school was one that had delayed early last night, but my sons school hadn’t.  In all honesty I was sure my sons school would at least delay today, but amazingly they are the ONLY school in the area that never did this morning.  The worst part of it is the fact that a huge chunk of the students are walkers, meaning that they walk to and from school, and the residents in town are infamous for not clearing their side walks.  With as bad as these roads are and as crappy as the weather is right now, I made the executive decision that my son is not going to school today.  I am not going to put him on a school bus that has NO reason to be on the roads!  The roads are not even close to being cleared, and ODOT representative said they are “hoping” to have the roads cleaned by the rush our drive home TONIGHT!  I’ll never understand his school, not in a heart beat!