Life Viewed Through an Amber Focus

It's amazing what they will excuse me for. Not my various disabilities. Not my various medications. Not (permanently anyway) upcoming surgeries with doctor's notes. No, it's the fact that I'm a SAHM with my spouse working in a different state and I don't have anyone else available who can take my kids to and from school or be home with them on early release/day's off from school. Oh, and it's not excused for just six months and then we'll try again, like usual. It's excused, period. I will never understand our court system and the jury selection process. My eldest sister told me she was excused from jury selection because she'd never smoked pot. It was not a drug case. Umm...okay. If I knew it was that easy...

Anyway, it is nice to know I have my life back. Now if they will just leave me alone for a few years I will be happy. Give me time to get my body back to where it was before the knee surgery and the hip injury and to restore my health and strengthen my back muscles so that I can sit for that many hours on a hard chair, and I will be happy to serve. After my kids are grown. Still feeling a little bit stressed over it all, but at least it's done and I am saving the phone call in my voice mail just in case. Because I don't trust the system one bit.

We got a call at 6:00 a.m. that the alarm at the house was going off AGAIN.  You can believe that I was not happy about this one iota.  Somehow or other one of the windows had been jimmied.  I'm not sure how but when we got there we found it open 2 inches, yet they'd taken the time to put the screen back on.  And it was one of the windows that was totally exposed to view, even if it was dark at 6:00 a.m.  Crazy chance to get caught doing that.  There was a clear fingerprint on the window and the sherrif's deputy dusted but it could be one of ours for all we know.

Anyway, they got into the house and then tore both the alarm panel and the alarm box off the wall, but then they went out the back door because the deadbolt was undone.  I think they planned to tear off the alarm and try to come back again later to steal stuff.  Nothing was taken this time either and the police were on the scene pretty quickly.  We took an hour or so to get there.

The long and the short of it is we rented a U-Haul and today and over the course of the next few days we are simply getting everything out of there.  Just shoveling it into boxes and moving it to storage.  Chris was able to fix the alarm and the alarm panel.  Having an electrical engineer in the family is a good thing.  If he hadn't been able to do it it would have cost $200 for ADT to come out and fix it and we would have had to wait until Thursday.  But it's working, we tested it.  Chris then went through and drilled holes and put long screws into place so that none of the windows can be opened even if they break the lock and the wooden pegs.  We also left on all the security lights.

I am hoping that's the end of it, but we will be out there early in the morning and all day for the next several days until it's all packed up and out of there and the locked U-Haul will be parked there so it's obvious people are about.  Chris's dad and my mom will be helping some, but I don't know how much at this point.  My mother tends to drive me crazy in situations like this though.  Hopefully that won't be the case too much this time.

I have to make arrangements for the piano to be moved tomorrow.  That's the only thing I am worried about at all.  There is nothing of real value left, just stuff nobody really cares about which will eventually get garage saled or given to charity or something.  Downsizing is something I'm really big on right now.  I will never be a packrat or over consumer again, or allow my family to be.  I will be so happy when it's all taken care of and we can get on to fixing it up and selling the blasted thing.

Anyways, with all the packing and moving this week I don't know what kind of a posting schedule I'll be able to maintain.  I'm writing on the car ride back and forth but that's about it.  Chapter nine of LoF is almost finished, so that one at least won't take too long to go up.  Probably not tomorrow though.

Amy, I'm still thinking about you and your son and keeping you in my prayers, but I likely won't be around for chatting at all for a while.  Sorry, I was hoping to.  *HUGS*

So even though I have been utterly and completely blocked on Hunger Moon for...oh, far longer than I even care to think of, the entire plot of Chaste Moon (which is book 3 in the BWY universe) has sprung fully formed into my head over the course of the last week while I was struggling to write anything.  I have character names and personalities, settings, planetary laws and customs and two chapters that take place in the middle written, around which it will be very easy to write forward and backward from.  There is also the very inkling of what is going to happen in the next chapter of Hunger Moon beginning to form in my mind.  It's very elusive at the moment, like pulling wisps of fog together, but at least I can sort of sense it beginning to coalesce together in my head.  After all I have to finish HM before I can even think of posting CM.  Incentive, in a way, I suppose.

And Zeppelins and Donna have stopped being so stubborn and I've been able to start on the next chapter of that.  I can't promise anything before the end of the weekend unless I get going on a real writing spree.  And there isn't going to be any real smut for a while because we are going to be moving heavily back into the plot.  There will always be implied smut, though. *grins*  It is Jonathon and Rose after all.

The dance recital is this weekend with dress rehearsals today and tomorrow afternoon and then showings Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening.  I will be very glad when this is over and I don't have to think about it again for ages.  It's a bit stressful.

On the homeschool front Tobias has one thing left to do, the semester review and assessment in history.  Well, we've done the review once but I want to do it again just to be sure.  Then he is officially done.  Rose still has a ways to go but she is making steady progress.  And with Tobias done I have a lot more time to help her if she needs it.



 

( Life Stuff )
As for the fic update, I've written almost 2000 words on the next chapter of Zeppelins and my ficathon fic is up to 1500.  It's Nine/Rose with Jack.  It's an adventure fic that centers around an alien elephant.  It probably will not have smut in it and will be more along the lines of Just Another Shop Girl, only shorter.  Not that it won't have innuendo and a bit of spicy talk here and there, and lots of flirting, but the focus of the ficathon is adventure so I'm leaning more in that direction.

If you're waiting up for me to post Nine!fic tonight, go to sleep.  It ain't happening.  Tomorrow there will be something, but not tonight.  I am having a bit of a crappy day today.  Mostly because somebody cut the paint on our new car.   We haven't even had it a month yet.  There is a perfectly straight line across the hood and down one side to the tire.  I mean the line is perfectly straight, this wasn't a random keying thing, this was a very deliberate and precise act.  Like box cutter and a ruler precise or garot wire with two people standing on either side of the car and just bringing it down and slicing through the paint.  It's too perfect.  You can't really see it unless you're standing right there, but I know it wasn't there this morning when I took the kids to school this morning and it was there when I went out to pick them up from school, which means it happened between 9:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., when I was home.  In my driveway.  I'm thinking it probably happened after 2:30 when the junior/senior high school bus came, but before I left.