Updates

I've been incredibly lazy about updating lately so here's the scoop for anyone that is interested.

Jamie has been by a few times over the past couple of weeks getting his clothes. Last week, he turned up looking for more clothes but i haven't washed them yet (they are wayyyyy down on my list of things to do). That same night when BT went out to get something from his car in the parking lot, he discovered that someone had rifled through the car (seems that BT neglected to lock one of the rear doors) and stole all of the change out of the car and several things from the backseat that I was taking to the foodbank donation place. There were alot things that weren't stolen that made it likely that Jamie was the one who did the rifling. We can't PROVE he did it but it is just too coincidental. So Jamie shows up Tuesday night and when BT confronted him, they got into a scuffle at the front door. After alot of screaming, yelling and wrestling, Jamie finally left. Jamie did tell me one thing though that I'm still freaking about, the court has DROPPED the stolen vehicle charge - all he is on the hook for now is obstructing the police and he's only going to get probation for that. I dunno, I'm just shaking my head here, I dont' think he learned a thing from this whole experience other than the fact that he got away with it.
My little dog Toto hasn't been well for the last couple of weeks. She's been yelping when you try to touch her and hasn't wanted to eat or drink. I finally had to force a baby aspirin into her and that seemed to perk her up a bit so she was eating a bit. As soon as I had the cash (cuz you know a vet won't just bill you - ohhhh no) I took Toto to the vet - seems she's getting old (duh). Anyways, they wouldn't give her anything for pain with doing some ultra expensive tests - now I'm paying for a course of injections of codroitin and I have to give her glucosimine every day. It seems to be working so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a few more happy years for my little used doggie. Her shots are costing $26 a pop and she needs four of them, the visit cost $50 and the pills cost another $25. I don't mind paying for it if she starts feeling better.
My superintendent died on Monday. He had a minor heart attack a month or so ago but I thought he was recovering from what his wife said but he passed away. According to the family (when I went to the viewing), they were going to do surgery to help him heart but it turned out that he wasn't strong enough for the operation. He returned home from the hospital on the Friday and spent the weekend saying goodbye to his family. It's very sad for his wife, I just don't know what she's going to do without him. Rest in peace Jim - you were a good man.

Terry Shiavo

So it's been all over the news for the last little while about that poor woman and what they are going to do with her. I'm of two minds on what they should be doing - starvation is a horrible way to go but I know a little too much about people in a vegetative state to believe that she is someday going to recover. You see, my ex's youngest brother is very much like Terry S. including the feeding tube although he does have a trach tube just to keep his lungs healthy.

Wayne was a healthy, vital funny 21 year old who was going to take his real estate exam the following day, at night he delivered pizzas for money to pay for his car so that his parents wouldn't have to. It was in May of 1990 and he was three blocks away from his home returning to the pizza place after delivering an order. He was turning left on a green light when a car from his right ran the red light and slammed into him. His car was hit so hard the passenger side of his car crumpled in and hit him on the side of the head. His head was bounced between his door window and the crumpled remains of his passenger door several times knocking him out. The car was propelled out of the intersection and into a parking lot where it then came to a rest by crashing into the rear of a parked car. The first people to make it to Wayne thought that he was dead because the footwell on the drivers side was two inches deep in his blood. He regained conciousness while the ambulance was removing him from the car, and he didn't look too bad, no broken bones , a few cuts on his face and hands , and a cut on the right side of his head. Wayne lost conciousness on the way to the hospital and that was when they realized that his head injury might be worse than they thought. He was transferred to a trauma centre a couple of hours later and that was when Potsie and I got the call to come as he wasn't expected to live through the night. By the time we got to the hospital he was in surgery so they could put an intercranial bolt in his head to determine how much his brain was swelling. Eventually, it was determined that the swelling in his brain caused tears in his brain stem and cortex - injuries that would not repair themselves and there was nothing that the doctors could do. Wayne is not on life support, just a feeding tube. There was a point when he was in a coma that his parents could have pulled the life support but they are Jehova's Witnesses and refused. Eventually, Wayne came out of his coma and he was taken off a ventilator and all he requires now is the feeding tube and after a few bouts of pneumonia, a trach tube that has a kind of humidifier attached to keep his lungs healthy. Wayne is not aware, oh his eyes are open but he's not in there any more hard as that is to say.
Wayne is one of the lucky few brain injured people that has excellent care. His mother was a nurse and he lives at home with 24 hour nursing care. His parents converted part of their house to a room for him with his own sun porch and all the things that he needs. Katie was born approx. a month and a half after Wayne's accident so this May will be 15 years that he has been like this and I have to say he's had great care - not a single bed sore and physical therapy has kept his hands and feet from becoming too badly curled with posturing. The doctors say that he could live to be 60 and his mother is terrified about what will happen to him when she is gone, Potsie's dad died last year and she is 68.
I'll probably get roasted for saying this but I sometimes wish that he HAD died in the accident rather than be sentenced to this half life. Looking into his eyes you can see that he's just not there anymore. At first I had nightmares that he was still AWARE in his head, unable to move or talk and knowing that his mother was changing his diapers but over the years nothing has changed, he's blank with no signs of awareness at all and believe me it's been tested by so many doctors that I was very thankful his parents lived in Canada with its socialized medicine. They even flew him to a special hospital in Florida that specializes in head trauma and air ambulances don't come cheap. His mother still holds out the faint hope that someday a miracle will happen and he'll just...wake up but even she admits that it's 99.9% never going to happen. So I can understand why Terry's husband is fighting to let her go and I can also understand her parents not wanting to, I don't think I could make that kind of decision. I know I wouldn't want to live like that but if it were one of my children I'd probably fight just as hard as her parents are.

BTW the driver that hit Wayne was drunk.

Sharin' time

I was reading justrose on Monday March 14, a post entitled Resolved and I felt the need to share. JR was talking about her awful father-in-law and I could have sworn she was talking about my ex father-in-law! He was a horrible horrible man who really went out of his way to make me feel rotten. When Potsie and I told him we were going to get married he went off the deep end. Without looking at me once, he told me that I was poor white trash and not what he had raised his son to marry, that I should get my raggedy ass back to the other side of the tracks and never darken his door again. His mother then went on to tell me that I would provide them with crippled grandchildren because of my terrible genes and health. Through all of this, Potsie never said a word - not to me, not to his parents nothing. Finally I had enough and told Potsie to take me home and two days later I gave him his ring back and told him I couldn't marry him until he cut the apron strings. After about two years, we met up again and started dating and then he moved in. When his parents found out, they would ask him every time he went over if I had given him AIDS yet. Needless to say, I wanted NOTHING to do with them. Then I became pregnant with Katie - again they were not pleased when Potsie told them, they wanted to know if he was sure the baby was his. Things would have stayed at a stalemate except that Potsie's youngest brother (Potsie is the middle brother of 5 boys) was in a terrible car accident and has been in a vegetative state ever since. Katie was born and we heard not one word from his parents, when Potsie called to tell them she had arrived they were uninterested. Then his second youngest brother announced he was gay - suddenly there was no hope for more grandchildren and they were interested in Katie. I could have been a bitch and no one would have thought less of me but I didn't want to deprive Katie of her grandparents. I might not have liked them but they loved Katie passionately and she loved them. Potsie's father passed away two years ago and as much as I didn't like him, I felt for his mother as she seemed so lost without him. Potsie's mom even calls here occasionally to talk to Katie and we get along well enough without Potsie Sr. around. So needless to say I can sympathize completely with JR in her situation.

So my friend Rowan has got her blog up and running so stop in and say hi here Thanks!

Feelin better

I'm almost feeling like my old self again. Thank gawd. So it was a weekend full of giggling girls - not that they were any trouble. They stayed up til 3 am every night and slept til noon every day . Man oh man they can eat though LOL.

I'm hurted

So I was cleaning the house in preparation for Katie's friend staying over and I bent over. Bad move. My back is giving me enormous grief and I have pain radiating down both legs. Greeeaaatttt. Now I get to hobble around like an ancient hunchback and hope it gets better soon. I thought just lying still would help but I've got shotting pains down the outside of my legs when I do. Needless to say, I'm uncomfortable. Ain't life a peach sometines?

In answer to Leslie's question, yup ballroom dancing. My ex and I took lessons for about two years. We learned to waltz, chacha, mambo, swing, rhumba, tango, hustle, merangue, foxtrot and bolero. God bless Arthur Murray! LOL It was tons of fun and we even entered a competition. If you can afford the lessons, I say skip the gym and go dancing. Best weight loss program I was ever on and amazing fun too. I miss it.

Okay

I'm so over myself now LOL. I don't know what was wrong with me today but my mood was foul to say the least. At least I got some housework done and I didn't kick any small furry animals in the process ( they MUST be wrapped around me at all times *sigh). I have to get this place cleaned a bit as Potsie's fiance's daughter is coming to spend the weekend here with Katie. Gawd, that sounds weird doesn't it? LOL Her and Katie are like two peas in a pod though so hopefully everything will run smoothly and there won't be (too much) drama but with 2 14 year old girls there is bound to be some. Thanks everyone for your nice comments - it helps to know that someone is out there reading this lol.
Soooooo my friend Rowan has started a blog. She's had LiveJournal for a while but it's not really doin much for her so when I told her about my blog she tuned in and read for a while and now she's started her own. Once she really gets up and running I'm going to post a link. She has the motherinlaw from hell I kid you not, I never knew just how much patience that Rowan had until she started telling me some of the things that woman has said. Ay carumba, I think I'd be in jail for homicide by now if she was my motherinlaw. Rowan and her lovely husband M (who is a dead ringer for John Cusak) dropped by on Saturday and we spend a couple of lively hours catching up and chasing the youngest rugrat as he chased the cats and tried to eat their food LOL. I used to see them all the time when I was with Potsie and all four of us were taking ballroom dancing lessons (Rowan and M are GREAT dancers btw), I miss all the time we used to spend together cuz omg we laughed all the time and we had so much fun. When Potsie and I split up we all kind of backed off to see how things would settle and now hopefully I can start spending time with them again.
Anyhow, I've rambled on enough for one night LOL.

One a those days

You ever have a day where you are just cranky for no reason? I'm having one of those days. A day where everything is pissing me off from the laundry becoming a mountain in the other room to stupid commercials on the tv. Funny thing is I'm all by myself today - well just the dog and the cats are here with me LOL.
I'm gonna find something to eat - maybe that will brighten my outlook on life before anyone else gets home. Hopefully I'll be out of full bitch mode by then.

Gay marriage/civil unions

It seems like just about everyone I read regularly has taken a stand so I thought I should speak up.
Personally, it doesn't matter to me if someone who's gay gets married or not. I think any couple that is seriously committed to one another whether they be hetro or homo should have the right to get married. Granted those marriages would be civil unions as a church couldn't be forced to perform weddings in conflict with their beliefs. Is this a burning social issue or should it be? NO. What benefit do gay people get for being married? Tax breaks? Not much. Health benefits? They damn well should - if common-law marriage partners are entitled to benefits then so should same sex partners. Survivor benefits? They should be entitled to those as well. When all is said and done, it's a piece of paper. What the fight is really for is acknowledgement of a long-term partnership and the need to stop treating same sex couples as second class citizens in alot of areas. Truly, what someone does in the privacy of their bedroom is no one else's business as long as it's between consenting adults and there are alot of people out there with purile minds that need to mind their own business. I can't see that gay marriage could be any worse than straight marriage with a divorce rate of nearly 50%. Makes me think of the US military and their "don't ask, don't tell" policy. For gawds sakes, if someone wants to volunteer to go and get his ass shot off instead of me, does it really matter if he finds men more attractive than women? Not to me. From my point of view, the only people affected by a same sex marriage are the two people involved so maybe everyone else should just butt out.
*getting off my soapbox now* LOL

Addendum: This post is dedicated to all my blogfriends who live an "alternative lifestyle" (lol) - Tony, Snicks, Pax, Anne and TC. (Happy now??)

Opinions

Well the super and the roofing guys came to look at the damage. It was funny hearing these roofing goofs trying to get me say that the leaks were here before. I've lived in this lovely(yah right) townhouse now for three years and I've NEVER had a leak until these brain surgeons did their roofing job. Supposedly, the leaks are going to be fixed but what I want to know is if they are going to be paying me for the lumber to rebuild the bottom of Katie's bed - probably not but I can dream LOL.
No word from errant son Jamie since he showed up the other day to pick up his walkman. He was SUPPOSED to come back the next day to pick up his clothes but nada. I got a phone call yesterday from one of the programs that he was referred to and I told them that I have nothing to do with that anymore as Jamie isn't living here anymore. It'll be interesting to see if Jamie follows through on any of them.

Into each life,

a little mold must grow. I mentioned that we had a leak a while ago, well we found out the leak was Katie's window. For some reason it's leaking like a sieve. The roofs on our units were re-done in Sept or Oct and they did a piss poor job of it. According to the super, there had been alot of complaints about leaks. Well, this past week Katie's window has been leaking really really badly so while she was away this weekend at her dad's we decided to move her into Jamie's old room. This was a major project as we needed to empty her waterbed and we were going to paint Jamie's room. When we emptied the bed and lifted the support boards omg underneath it was absolutely fuzzy with black and white mold. No wonder Katie hasn't been feeling well recently! So BT and I threw out the old base and built a new one then we took on the HUGE task of cleaning out Jamie's room. Jamie will NEVER live in the same house with his sister again. When I was cleaning his room, I found four holes in his wall covered by posters. Two of those holes were in the wall he shared with his sister, one was in the wall shared with the bathroom and the fourth was in the wall shared with the neighbour. They weren't large holes but they remind me creepily of peepholes and I won't have him in this house again. Anyhow, his old room was cleaned out, painted and we moved Katie's furniture in and tomorrow the super is coming with someone to look at the window in Katie's old room. While we were cleaning out Jamie's old room, I saw something odd about his ceiling, there is a bulge in the ceiling with a dark water stain on it. Looks like there is a leak above there as well. Ohhhhh yeah, I think we are all lucky to alive , in Jamie's room I found burn marks all over the carpet and a HUGE burn hole in his mattress. Seems we are all damn lucky not to have burned in our beds.