"Broken" Home For The Holidays...

I feel like our house had a major surgery... piece by piece, scar by scar, laughter begetting more laughter... we are becoming WHOLE again...

Christmas was good to us, in the sense that we had one...

However, my 2014 would not be complete without a sickness for my planned vacation...

Oh ye gods!  Thank you!

I call bullshit... every time we have tried to plan time together for any length of time I get something wrong with me...  Sick, ill, call it what you will... it sucks.  I did get through the entire SERIES of How I Met Your Mother...  Ithankyou...

It was, in fact, legen-wait-for-it...DARY!

I have been yelled at for years about not watching the show, and now I can tell you all to suck it cause I watched it, it was wonderful, and now we're moving on to other things...because not only does it now remind me of the great flood/renovation of 2014, it reminds me of how I was sick on Christmas, AGAIN...

You know, sometimes, change is a really good thing folks.

We had our company christmas party and might I say, it was great.  I was just great to sit in the front Lobby, phones off... but ringing that initial ring that takes them to voicemail in such a way that you would swear it was Howie chiming in... "That could be an order!", he would say if he were here...  and he was...

We had a great weekend considering... we had a nice night Friday the 19th, Saturday was nice, Sunday was Christmas with Gma and it was lovely... Then I woke up Monday to the ever dreaded sore throat/swollen glands... I felt feverish and chilled... I went down drastically in a matter of hours and had to go home.  Tuesday, stayed home and went to the dr.  Got two doses of anti-viral in me and went to work Wednesday for our ever appreciated and fantastic half day for Christmas Eve, went home and we had a Turkey dinner!  Our first ever Turkey Dinner for our family on Christmas Eve when it was JUST US FOUR!  Actually, come to think of it, it was our first ever dinner on Christmas Eve with just me n Choni.  It's always been Christmas Eve at the In Laws, Christmas Day at my Ma's...  Funny... talk about breaking free from tradition, that was holding strong 14 years!  Hah!

Anyhoo, woke up Christmas Day after the neighbors decided to party ALL NIGHT...  and into some of the morning... Until I picked up my handy phone with the handy list of contacts...one in particular being our County Sheriffs... Yeah!  I'm THAT CHICK! SO WHAT!!  I'm ALL FOR parties man, and I know Christmas Eve is a biggie for some people... BUT REALLY?!?  3AM!!!  And I don't mean the song!  I shut that fucker down@!@#%#$@%$#@

Christmas Day I woke up sicker...  I stayed on the couch while the kids ripped open their second batch of gifts, I saw awe and wonderment in what was probably the "smallest" Christmas ever and I felt great afterwards (emotionally).  We got up our things together and made the trek to Noni's for third Christmas and had another great time, more yummy food stuffs and we even got to take some home :)  My sis and bro in law and their (combined) 4 childrens were there, a houseful of kids.  What my Ma always wanted!  As the day went on, I was feeling less awesome.

I woke up Friday to the ickiest of ickinesses and I called my dr's office.  Told them how I was feeling and what was new and was gone and they called me in a Rx.  I then proceeded to have a couch bound Christmas break/ New Year's.  I STILL don't feel 100%.

I feel like I need to sleep a few more days.  I over do it the second I feel well.  That's a big problem for me.  But I can't help it, I feel like such a slug when I'm sick!!  I hate that feeling... that there are things to do and I'm not doing them.

But here we are, new year, new gear.  I am thinking that I am much more accepting already of the new year than ever.  I wanted to be done with 2014 so badly.  Generally there is a time frame that I go through where things need to be gotten used...  Happy to report, writing out that 2015 comes much more naturally than any year ever!  2015...FLOWS LIKE A RIVER FROM MY PENS!!  Wonderful...  I had a busy busy busy super busy Monday and today was much more doable... I had much more coffee too, so I'm sure that had NOTHING to do with it!  hehe...

Well, it's that time kids...gotta warsh out my mug and make the trip to the loo before my long trip home...  I need to write a note to myself to tell you about the great Purge... no not that mediocre movie...  we did our own purging during the great renovation and it felt great!  Loved it!

Spoke Too Soon Too Much Too Fast...Or How We Came To Realize That We Had No Idea What We Were Doing With A House......

Something about our little part of California that most people don't realize is that its got green yards and evergreens PLANTED INTO MAN MADE YARDS AND GARDENS.... it's a fuckin desert...

  Its like Peter Pan Syndrome for our region... Southern California is a man that doesn't want to realize or accept the fact that its getting old so it buys a Ferrari by way of planting and over watering grass in a desert climate that needs succulents and desert indigenous landscaping. 

If that even makes any sense.

Our house was previously owned by geniuses...rocket scientists disguised as homeowners...  And of course, the bank we bought our house from couldn't wait to get this thing off their hands either...then comes us...apartment dwelling for so long we forgot what it was like to be in a house...  one reared by a father ringing the bell of Work Smart Not Hard all day long and the other with no Mr Fix It in their life at all...We had no idea that the backyard was graded too high...that the dog run was put in wrong...that everything about it would kick us in the ass one day...

And it did...HARD...

 

Three weeks before Christmas, in a tiny Who House, we are forced to take 400 sq feet of belongings and shove them into the remaining 800 sq feet of house that did not receive rain damage.  I can see how a renovation can tear and strain relationships...  ours is doing just fine because my husband is amazing...  our family has been wonderful as far as my mother offering sanity via venting and ranting and my mother in law still having rooms set up for us to stay the night.  Thing 2 has been wonderful as well due entirely to her ability to sleep comfortably in the pack n play as long as her trusty boppy lay beneath her and her build a bear Hello Kitty is by her side... 

Still...  there is an amount of guilt...there is the thought that I could have single handedly prevented this in so many (albeit unforeseen) ways... because someone always knows more or knows better or can do better than me... than us...  and that's fine... but still.  I'm not going to ridiculously pretend like its not actually passing through my mind every other minute.  Coworkers and friends are to our rescue as well and I feel like the chunk out of our savings is not as big as it SHOULD be due to us not being covered for this particular instance under our homeowners insurance...lame.

Living room camping on our pull out couch is what we have been doing... Monday(today) our dry wall gets put back on and hopefully our vanities will get put back on and we can take showers here again...  I am a lot calmer than I was,yet still not completely calm... fantastically we are still a family and still together and still breathing so that's nice....  

My hubby stepped up amazingly fantastically superbly and dug a huge nasty "French drain" in the side of the house and started leveling it out.  Then CoWorker Husband #1 came over and checked out our house and the temporary drainage ditch. Yes we need a permanent one, but the temp one will hold just fine until then.

No we're "There"... over there, by all those people investing into their houses...that's us.  That's our spot in life right now... at the same time as trying to be US we have to be "homeowners" too...  it's a tough juggle when you buy what you can afford.  It was either this or stay apartment dwellers for quite a while longer, and LORD KNOWS where we'd be if we did.  I actually don't want to think about it..  Because as clean and easy and glorious as that sounds, that's not us...Not anymore...it's universes, galaxies away from us. You never go forward by going backward, I truly believe that... so I'm going to apply that same logic to this right here...

Meanwhile:

EVERYTHING ELSE IS FUCKIN AWESOME!!!!

I mean that... work...wow, we just got a great update at work about how well we're doing... We were sailing in yachts, then we had to downgrade to dingys, then we were drowning... in scuba gear with oxygen at 1% and boom, we were back in dingys,  And there we've stayed because of the recession... Fine...  But now, now we're profiting again in ways that make us have numbers in line for our 1st quarter already and I can't tell you how exciting that is, especially when we have a nay sayer walking around like a god and everything out of their mouth is "Peril!" "Plight!" and I can't take it anymore...so the op's manager sent out a little email from his corner of the universe and it made my day...  Little things keep happening that make things great and I'm so happy... but isn't true...when one facet of your life is picking up steam another falls fantastically to pieces...  Amazing how true that really is.  Anyhoo, that's all from this end...  hopefully.  I just want to go home tonight and have walls.  I never realized how accustomed to our little lifestyle I was until I woke up one day and it was gone...