Just Simply Holly

The kids were asking me the other day what we were going to do for their dad for Fathers Day. It wasn’t until they asked me that I realized that it’s only a few weeks away. My husband is like most other guys, he likes tools and gadgets. Since I don’t know enough about the types of tools he really uses and needs for work, I decided that the best thing we could get him for Fathers Day would be in the gadget department.

Since he purchased a new laptop a few months ago, he doesn’t need a new computer, so there’s one thing to take off the list. He also purchased a new MP3 player recently, so I can take that off the list as well. Then I remembered something he said the other night when we were watching a movie. We have an old and very cheap surround sound system that does not work well, and he said something about how nice it would be to get a better system that actually worked like it was supposed to!

So I clicked on over to Buy.com to see what kinds of surround sound systems they had the best deals on and found an awesome Harman Kardon CP40 5.1 channel home theater system with a DVD player AND a powered subwoofer that I could snag for way less than the normal retail price!

I’ll admit that I’m not the most technical savvy person when it comes to stereo type equipment, so I hopped on the phone and called my sister who is. She and I both looked around the Buy.com website for a while, checking out the great deals that they have on every type of electronic gadget you can imagine. My sister couldn’t get over the amazing prices they were offering on their weekly deals and she even snagged up one of these Digital Spectrum pink digital frames that they have on special right now for $59.99!

Anyway, back to me and my search for a surround sound system. Buy.com had several to choose from, and it was not an easy job trying to narrow the choices down, each different system had it’s own awesome features, but ths Harman Kardon just seemed to jump out at me as the best system and the best deal!

And I really like the fact that it comes with a built in DVD player, the one that we have right now is a combination DVD/VCR and we lost the remote for it in the last move, so you actually have to push the buttons to work it, which is a pain, especially with my old eyes….LOL!

Now all I have to do is figure out which day I can order it so that it will be shipped to the house on a day that he’ll be at work and won’t see it so that he’ll be surprised when he opens it on Fathers Day!

Do you ever look back on your life and the moments that forever changed it? Sixteen years ago today was one of those such moments for me! It was the day I said “I DO”. I won’t even pretend that our life together has been easy, because not a moment of it has. But no matter what was going on in our lives, my husband always let me know that he was there for me. He has shown me unconditional love and support through times in my life when no one else would. We’ve been through a “rough patch” lately, but I have no doubt we’ll make it through this one like we have the others!

Here’s a glimpse into the 16 years we’ve been together…

We had a moment earlier that started out scary, but turned out funny! We had just finished eating dinner and my husband and I sat down to grab a smoke before heading outside with the dogs. He decided to take a drink of his coffee before getting up from his desk and somehow the coffee managed to go down the wrong pipe. The next thing I knew he spit coffee EVERYWHERE and was choking.

I got up and ran over him to make sure he was going to be OK, but by that time he was laughing his butt off and assuring me that he was fine. Since I had just had the crap scared out of me, I was having a hard time accepting that he was laughing until he pointed down to the floor by his desk. I looked down and there was Riley, our white Labrador Retriever, COVERED in coffee, just laying on the floor, licking up the coffee around him. He wasn’t one bit alarmed by what just happened, he was just happy that he was getting one of his favorite treats…LOL!

After we got the mess cleaned up I told my husband that we’d better start checking out life insurance rates because if he did something like that again, I was going to end up dying of a heart attack. Yes, we can laugh about it now, but at the time it was happening, I was terrified!

The company that my husband works for is just about to turn 1 year old. They’ve grown in leaps and bounds over the past year and want to come up with an inexpensive way to tell their customers and employees thank you for all that they have done in the past year. When my husband told me they were asking the employees for suggestions and ideas I asked him if he had asked them if they had thought about custom printed calendars. Everyone can use a good calendar and it’s also a way to see the name of the company that you received it from on a regular basis. He thought it was a great idea and said when he went to work on Monday he’d tell them about it. I asked him what my commission would be if that was the idea they went with…LOL!

I tell you, time is seriously flying lately!  It was just Christmas and now we’re only 2 days away from New Years Eve?  Somehow it seems that I’ve lost a few days this week because it sure doesn’t feel like Saturday!

There hasn’t been too much going on this week.  The kids have just kind of chilled out for the most part, except for when I ask them to help me with something.  They’ve been awesome about helping me, I haven’t gotten a single argument from them for a change!  I finally managed to get the Christmas tree down yesterday…YAY!  I don’t think I’m going to have a real tree again, I just don’t feel comfortable with them and worry that if I have the lights on too much it will dry it out faster and/or cause it to catch on fire.

I also managed to get a good part of my room organized and cleaned this week.  It’s been a nightmare trying to find things in the mess in there!  I’ve come to the conclusion that we simply have too many clothes and the ones that we no longer wear MUST GO!  I have some of them bagged up to give to the local homeless shelters, and hope to get through the last of them here within the next week or so.

I have a fairly big project for my hubby’s next day off work, “IF” he gets another one…LOL!  He’s worked every day since Wednesday and will be working again tomorrow.  Fortunately today and tomorrow are only 8 hour days, Wednesday and Thursday were 16 hour days for him and yesterday was a 12 hour day.  It will make for a very nice check, but he sure is tired!  But he was tickled to get home tonight while it was still daylight out, and he’ll be even more happy to get a full nights sleep tonight!

For gas purposes, we’ve decided that my husband is going to drive my car for work for a while. His drive to work is about an hour, depending on the weather. During bad weather it can take him as much as an hour and a half to get to work. But my Honda gets much better gas mileage than his truck does. Last night, when he was driving home from work, the window visor that was over the window of the drivers door cracked and flew off the car. It wasn’t humanly possible for him to stop and get it, nor would I have expected him to. So now I have to replace the whole set because I can’t find an auto accessories store online that sells just one. He tried calling around to the junk yards to see if anyone had a Honda that had a set of them, but it’s not a part that the local junk yards keep track of. I’m glad it was something as simple as a window visor though, that’s nothing major compared to tires or things that would prevent the car from running! But I swear, every time something like this happens, it’s always my car and never his truck…LOL.

You know, I love my husband with all my heart! We’ve been together for more than 17 years and married for over 16 years. But sometimes he comes up with the most off the wall ideas! It’s not that they aren’t good ideas; it’s just that they come out of the middle of nowhere!

For instance, here’s his latest idea. We’ve been talking about getting things together to make an official offer to buy the house we are currently renting. The house is AWESOME and we love living here! The lot that it is on is more than 2 acres and it is surrounded by protected woodland that will never be developed. We’ve talked about the things we’d like to do if we do get to buy it.

The house itself is an “L” shaped ranch and it’s about 1500 square foot. The “L” part of the ranch was added on and consists of a second bathroom and the family room. What we’d like to do if we buy it is expand this part of the house all the way over and make it a rectangular house and make the family room double it’s current size. My husband said that if we did that, he’d want to make it so that the front living room would then be a game room and in the middle of it would be a pool table.

He even went online looking for furniture and accessories to go in his new game room and told me he had found the perfect chairs at www.borderbilliards.com, then pulled up the website to show me. I have to admit that the Mahogany chairs he showed me were beautiful! He also showed me the light that he’d choose to hang over the pool table.

I guess the only thing that makes him talking about this so off the wall to me is that neither one of us have ever been big billiards players since we’ve been together.  I used to play a lot of pool in my early 20’s, but don’t think I’ve played a single game since we’ve been together, except online.  But I honestly think it would be something that we all would be able to enjoy as a family!  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see whether or not we can make things work and buy the house first though!

With the job my husband is working right now, he has times where he’ll work out of town for a week or more at a time. My son and I do pretty good about him being gone, it really doesn’t upset us that much. But my daughter is a true Daddy’s Girl and she misses her daddy desperately when he’s out of town!! Fortunately he calls every night and she can chat with him online, which helps, but when it’s bed time and daddy isn’t there to kiss her goodnight and tuck her in, that’s when she has the most difficult time!

I recently discovered a website called FotoBed.com that can take a photo and print it onto things like pillow cases, shower curtains and blankets. I think if I were to take my daughters favorite picture of her daddy and have them print it onto one of their Photo Blankets it would make a huge difference and help her get through the times when he is out of town! Their website is so easy to use and their products are completely custom made, you can even add text to your photo project, which is an added plus in my eyes. They are also the only website that offers custom made shower curtains from your photos!

While I’m having a blanket made for her, maybe I’ll have a pillow case, like this one, made for myself, that way I can still snuggle up to him when he’s not home!

On top of the stress that he’s currently dealing with, my husband is also dealing with a fairly significant amount of pain. When he was in High School, he played football. During one of the games in his Senior year he was tackled and messed up his knee bad enough that he had to have surgery on it. Now mind you, this was back in the 70’s, so they didn’t have the type of surgical technology that they do today. So even though he had surgery, it really didn’t correct or fix the problem.

Then, the year that I was pregnant with our daughter, he had an accident at work and took out the same knee. The accident resulted in him tearing his ACL, but his work wanted him to go through physical therapy and see if it would heal that way, which we all knew it wouldn’t. Finally, after fighting with them for several months they finally gave in and allowed him to have arthoscopic surgery shortly after our daughter was born. Although this surgery finally fixed his knee, he has still dealt with chronic pain the past 12+ years.
Back in July I was given some samples of Freeze It Gel and I gave them to my husband to see if they would help him deal with the chronic pain he has with his knee. It worked so well that after the samples were used up, he went out and bought a large tube of it as well as one of the roll on bottles. He keeps the roll on one with his work tools, that way when he’s having pain at work he can apply the Freeze It at work without having to deal with applying the gel from the tube. He LOVES this stuff, it has been a HUGE lifesaver for him! And with all of the climbing in and out of the crawlspace because of the water problems we’ve had the past couple of days, he’s been relying on his Freeze It gel even more!

So if I were to, say, win a 1 year supply of Freeze It, not only would it help my husband deal with his chronic pain, it would also be one less thing that he has to worry about buying for a year, which would be a huge relief considering the fact that we’re not completely sure about his job right now. It’s not that Freeze It is expensive, it’s just that I’m trying my hardest to save every penny I can right now! So PLEASE Freeze It, help me keep this gorgeous smile on my husband’s face.

He’s a very important person to me and I hate seeing him in pain!

If you’d like to find out more about Freeze It gel and how it could help you or your loved one with any of the following ailments:

• Sore muscles and muscle sprains
• Back, shoulder and neck pain
• Arthritis and painful ankle, knee, hip and elbow joints

The water problems that started yesterday morning are far from over!  We had water early last night, but by bed time we were having problems again.  We got it “temporarily” fixed, enough to do showers, but that was it.  We ran over to the landlords house and grabbed 2 five gallon buckets and a five gallon jug of water so that we could at least use one toilet and have water for cooking and coffee.

Hubby headed off to work this morning and before he left he told me that I could use the water, to just be careful.  (Meaning the water from the faucets)  But I was scared that I’d do something and end up burning up another water pump, so I used the water out of the buckets and jugs instead.  When he got home this afternoon he checked everything, ran the water in 2 faucets for what seemed to be an hour, and it seemed to be working good, so we went ahead and started some laundry and stuff.   That lasted a couple of hours and we were back to no water again, so he headed back down to the crawl space, shut the pump off for a few minutes, turned it back on and everything was OK again.

He called the landlord to let him know what was going on and he said he’d be over later.  When he showed up he came with 3 cases of water and 3 one gallon jugs so that we would have plenty of water to drink and cook with.  He also brought a truck with 350 gallons of water in a tank.  They hooked it up so that the pump would draw water from the tank rather than the well and so far, things are running OK.  We don’t have but maybe 2/3 of the pressure we had, but it’s definitely better than nothing and works fine for showers and laundry.

The landlord is going to get the papers from the county to find out 100% for sure where the well is on the property.  Then he is going to bring someone over to see what needs to be done, whether it be a new point put in or a deeper well drilled.  So, although we currently don’t have a permanent solution, we do at least have a temporary one and we do have running water in the house.

It’s frustrating though!  I see what my hubby is going through knowing that he’s not working the hours he was and the fact that they’ve talked about a layoff.  Add to that the stress and frustration of the water situation and he’s not in good shape!  I was talking to my best friend on the phone tonight and told her that he’s getting to the point that it worries me, that he’s almost to the point of being so depressed and stressed that he belongs in a hospital.  So please, keep him in your thoughts, prayers, etc, because I am truly worried about him and the effect that all of this is having on him!