If you think I flunk tests, you should meet my friend, Linda, she flunked out of hospice...she's my hero.

It's never good to get a call from your doctors office on a Sunday and it is usually never good to flunk lab tests.....unless it's me. Rhonda, the nurse in charge of the LymphoStat-B drug trials at my Rheumatologist's, called this afternoon to let me know that I had been accepted into the test group. Apparently I flunked enough of my lab tests to show that my lupus is active enough to be included. I am going to go to Tulsa on Tuesday to take the first treatment. Ironically, yesterday I had one of the best days in a long time. So good, that I called my mom to tell her I was feeling normal, that gave her a chuckle. Normal is such a subjective term and boy can we be subjective in my family.

RJ's first day in Iowa, "Where the he** am I? I went to sleep in Oklahoma!"

35hrs 51min 23sec...Okay, maybe I've noticed how long my favorite firstborn daughter, grandson and son-in-law have been gone. I can't go cold turkey, we talked 4 times today and have exchanged picture messages on our cell phones. Of course then I had to talk to my mom and sister each time to update them and I forwarded the picture messages on to everyone I could think of.

Empty nest is a bummer and I still have a chick at home. By the time my favorite youngest daughter leaves for college next year, I will have been a mom with a child at home for 24 years. That is more than half my lifetime. Actually, I think I have done pretty well, no big crying jags, but I did make my husband change the channel on the tv when he stopped channel surfing to watch Cold Mountain. It was at the part where soldiers raided a farm and pulled a young mother and her baby out of the house and laid the baby on the ground in the cold with out a blanket to die. THAT was not what I wanted to see yesterday.

Life's little ironies can take on a life of their own, like the time that we went to Estes Park, Colorado. We stayed in an old hotel that was in the process of being renovated into condo's. It was halfway up the mountain looking across from another old hotel called The Stanley on the other side of the valley. I had read up on our vacation destination and knew that Stephen King had stayed at The Stanley at the end of the busy season and was so taken with the feeling of isolation that he penned The Shining. We were there between busy seasons too and were the only people staying in the entire hotel, even the innkeepers lived in a separate house. I have never been big on sleeping so after everyone went to bed, I stayed up to enjoy the peace and quiet after several hours in a small car with two small children. My plan was to read and watch the news and relax. A local story caught my attention about a man who 20 years before, had killed some campers in the area and had just escaped from prison......Turning the tv off, I sat in the quiet and noticed something that I hadn't before....this building made a lot of noise. The wind whistled outside, there were creaks and thumps and I, being of sound mind, turned on every light in the place and sat across the room from the windows so I could watch them and the door. This wasn't the first or the last time that I stood watch because of real or imagined case of the 'fraidies.

If you have to spend the night in ER, I'm your girl, if you are up all night, having a nervous breakdown or have a child that is sick, I'm your girl....if you need someone up at 7am to go somewhere with you....call someone who cares.:> It's not that I am a night person by default, I truly enjoy from 10pm to 4am. I can be barely dragging through the day but come 10:00pm and I am wide awake.

RJ's Adventure is about to begin and I am not going to cry...yeah right.

I've promised myself that I won't cry, it would be selfish. I know that they will be just fine. I did it, I lived in Europe, Grand Prairie, Texas and Kansas City, all hours away from family. I have even greater faith in my daughter and her husband, that they will handle every speed bump that life throws at them. Lil' Pumpkin is spending the night with us, while his parents pack up 2 years of marriage. Not an easy job but especially difficult since they have to divide it between their new and hopefully few months in Iowa and the rest of their household that will go into storage here. I hate to go to sleep and miss a minute of him.

Imagine 2 cats, one Irish Setter puppy and a baby in an SUV for 10 hours...Adventure is the only word for it.




Gunner is going to be a great friend for RJ,once he grows into his feet. Right now he is all legs and about as graceful as a giraffe on ice, but he is a bundle of love.



Cricket, the Tortie and Kona Bean are uniquely qualified to raise RJ, they already love his mom and they are training Gunner to be tolerable. They say that people worshiped cats in ancient times. The people forgot but the cats never did.

The hardest years of my life were in college and I couldn't have a pet. My little fighting fish, Arthur, was beautiful and I did talk to him, but he didn't have much of a cuddle factor. I picked up a lot of strays and ended up keeping an Irish Setter that I named Cassie. She was the gentlest dog I have ever known. Kelci doesn't remember her but Cassie was her first guardian angel.

Smother Mother

My skills as a Smother Mother are about to be tested. My oldest daughter, Kelci, is leaving next week, with MY grandson to join her husband in Iowa, while he works for a couple of months. I haven't even got a leg to stand on. Her dad won a scholarship to study architecture in Europe for 7 months. We left when she was 8 months old and came back the night before Thanksgiving when she was 15 months old. It was in 1985 and terrorism was happening all over Europe. We were at places that blew up within 2 days of us being there, three different times. We arrived in Rome right after the Achilles Lauro had been hijacked the Italian government had collapsed. There were soldiers with machine guns at intersections and when my ex asked one for directions, I knew it was time to go home to Oklahoma....Yep, putting her grandparents through that kind of torture is really coming back to haunt me.

We did get both sets of grandparents to come over and visit us. There is nothing like strolling through the red light district in Amsterdam,with your in-laws. Below is Kelci and me in St.Mark's Square, Venice, Italy, 1985.

RJ spent the morning with me, the afternoon with his Great-Grandma Renee then the evening with me while his mother was taking some engagement pictures for some friends. Grandpa Ed walked by and started talking to him and RJ grabbed his finger in delight at the sound of a male voice and the comfort that there was still testosterone in the world. Being the first boy in 3 generations is a lot of pressure for the little guy, I think he is in danger of estrogen toxicity.

Hannah and Jason's engagement pictures turned out beautiful. Kelci is spreading her wings as a photographer and soaring.

Heart attack and roving tumors

The other night I couldn't sleep and finally gave in and took a sleeping pill about three in the morning. My husband gets up at six to get ready for work and that morning he wasn't feeling well and his left hand and arm was numb. He woke me to ask what I thought he should do and in my head I told him I had just taken a sleeping pill, but apparently all that I did tell him was to call the doctor. I do vaguely remember him asking me to drive him to the hospital but since he works at the hospital, I assumed he just wanted a ride to work and told him to have our youngest daughter take him. In my head once again,I explained that I could not drive with Ambien in my system.....Ambien makes me do a lot of things, once we found a half eaten ice cream bar by the printer...but that is another story.

How my husband,Ed, tells the story is that he woke up not feeling well and his arm and hand were numb and he was worried about a heart attack. He woke me up to ask me what to do, because I am the reluctant expert of all things medical in this family. I just sleepily told him to call the doctor, so he called into work to tell them that he wouldn't be in. He called the doctor after they got to the office and they said they would ask the doctor and call him back. All the while I slept blissfully on. At some point he became more concerned and wanted me to take him to the hospital. He was dying and his spouse did not give a care in the world. He got fed up and drove himself to the hospital and worked, until the doctor's office called him back with an appointment.

I have always teased him about his tumor that migrates. Every time he has a pain, he worries that it is a tumor. He is diabetic and has arthritis and the other various aches and pains of being sixty, so pains occur often, in numerous places.

Turns out he has a pinched nerve in his neck and needs to take muscle relaxers to treat it. He now knows that I do give a care, I just can't articulate that caring attitude if I have recently taken an Ambien.

I love him, but I can't work with him.

I love my husband. After my first marriage turned toxic, I was not looking to get married again. But then I met my best friend. He wrote to me first, the good old fashioned way to court,then he chuckled in that deep voice on the phone. I used to make him stay on the line until he feel asleep, just so I could hear him talk. We have so much in common,he's a chef, I like to eat. He likes to buy bookshelves, I like to read, a lot. He loves my daughters and I love his sons. BUT, did I mention that he is an excellent chef, he knows everything and he can make spam taste good. Sometimes handyman chores are not his forte...

One Saturday discord crept up between us,he lost his listening ability and I lost my patience. It was supposed to be a simple job....they ALWAYS are. We bought a keypad for outside the garage door. So whenever the kids lose their keys....again. They can get into the house with out jumping the fence, reaching up through the doggies door to unlock the back door.

There was a large page of instructions, that I hasn't read yet, it was divided and he was only reading the left side which was looking for dip switches on the motor unit on the ceiling, to set the code for the keypad. After I climbed the ladder that was broke and duct taped together, I couldn't find the dip switches and when I asked him what the right side of the instructions said, he told me it was the Spanish instructions and I just needed to look again. I finally got the instructions away from him and the right side was alternate instructions if you had a model that didn't have dip switches. DUH! So then I pushed the quick learn code button and he read the codes and put them into the keypad....nothing was working. At this point I was threatening to come down the ladder and bop him upside his head. Instead, I hit the button, climbed down off the ladder to put in the codes but he insisted on reading them to me. Yet another recipe for disaster. We were both pretty frustrated by this point and couldn't dial a code correctly if our life depended on it.

Despite the mutual aggression that was evolving, love prevailed and no bodily harm was done. We worked out one last plan, I would take the instructions up the ladder with me, push the button, and read the codes to him while he put them in. Ta Da! Yet another household chore finished, and only after putting it off for several months and nearly coming to blows. I can hardly wait to take up the carpet in the living room and refinish the hardwood floors underneath....I'll keep you posted....I may need bail money. :>