Hard day on the Planet

We live in a relatively small town, and dang it if somebody didn't STEAL my purse last week while I was about 10 feet away. Opened my car door and took it off the seat while I was right THERE. Hello? That's for big cities like Charlotte, not little old Boone. I was stinkin' furious as I had my fairly NEW palm pilot (miserable w/out it), all ID, mine AND THE KIDS' Social Security cards, credit/debit cards, the normal life-in-a-bag stuff. PLUS I had just bought the coolest leather purse on big-fat sale for $11. You can bet I ran back to the mall for another one and of course they were gone. Well, of course they were: $50 bags for $11. Dangit.

I'm slowly getting re-documented, but by the time I have enough documents to file a Fraud Alert with the credit companies, this fool could be sitting in Tahiti acting as me or one of my children. ACK! There are worse things in the world, and thankfully they didn't take my CAR (yes, the keys were in it; again, I was right THERE!) or the kids, or whatever.

But it happened late in the afternoon, so after I dealt with the police, I ran home to try to cancel everything before 5pm. THEN, hey, it's after 5pm and welcome to the early 1980s again: there's no way to ACCESS MY MONEY after hours as I have no ATM cards, and my son needs an antibiotic. So I had to borrow money from a dear friend to get medicine for my child. How helpless does that feel, I ask you. Ugh. Okay, I'm ranting but that really STINKS. And I have to explain to my kids why somebody took Mommy's purse and Mary-Chandler says "but I thought there was no such thing as ugly people". Gosh, if we could have only let her have those nice thoughts a little longer than FIVE years old before we step on that belief.

The Invisible Husband

Kent leaves early in the morning for a fun-filled 8 hour flight to Ecuador. He'll be back in 2 weeks. Out of the four years he's been with Operation Christmas Child, he's been away a compiled total of a year and a half. I can't stand knowing that information, it breaks my heart. So your husband bugs you a bit, hogs the covers at night, leaves his socks in the floor? At least he's HOME. Do something nice for him this Valentine's Day.

Snow Much Fun

Having grown up in Florida, where the big snow was a layer of dust-like filament, it's nice to live in a place where there are seasons, and lots of snow for kids! We love these little toboggon (sp?) discs that the kids go screaming down the yard in; I rode with Christopher last year and yanked my neck as we crashed into a snowbank. Stinks to get old. Fun to watch the young.

Thank God for Cordless Uprights and Computer Techs

Today I am particularly thankful for my cordless upright vacuum cleaner. No real reason, except that every day I need to vacuum the house for some child-borne mess and I can just grab it off the wall and go. I'm not talking about a Dustbuster, but a real upright vacuum. My Lowe's Hardware doesn't carry them anymore *ugh* so now we're dependent upon Kent bringing one home from one of his Denver or California trips about once a year. They're not flimsy, but we really beat them up with twice daily use in the house.

And: computer repair guys that COME TO MY HOUSE. I could write a praise & worship song for these people alone. My computer crashed yesterday late, I called at 7 am today, and a charming young whiz was at my door by 2:15 and out the door an hour later and my laptop was back in the land of the living. I run 2 home businesses from this computer: this was the business equivilent of Calgon taking me away.