I cannot believe how long it's been since I've posted on here! I swear I am going to get better about it. For now, I need to catch up.

Like I said in my last post in September Pat was on strike and he remained on strike a long, long time.... Ok, maybe 10 weeks or something but it seemed like forever. With the economy going in the toilet during that time I really was scared that the strike would go on forever. I was so depressed about it all that I barely emailed, let alone post on my blog.

In October my son Shane went to Iraq. He's gotten through 6 months now and is supposed to only be there for 6 more. In December it started snowing around the 18th, maybe earlier, I don't even remember but it lasted forever!!! I think it snowed every day for 4 months, I'm sure it couldn't have been that bad but we did have snow here for that long. I was so happy when I saw that last little pile of snow go away. For the first time since we moved here 7 years ago I have thought about actually moving for the last few months, not too far, just into town but away from the cold, long winters at my house. If it wasn't for Pat I'd probably do it too. I used to say I'd live here until I die and then have my ashes strewn around our property but not anymore. Hopefully we'll have a really nice warm Spring and Summer to make up for it and I'll forget about this moving nonsense. Right now it's almost May 1st and I'm sitting here typing this with my baseboard heat on next to me, my layer shirt on under my zipped up down coat... I'm serious! I felt bad for complaining last week because I saw that it was supposed to be 100 degrees in Baghdad, not far from where my son is stationed. I'll take cold weather any day over hot weather.

Right now I have to get ready to go to Tim's school conference so I'll get ready but I'll post more of what's been going on soon, maybe today and I'll post pictures too.....

The weather this month has been so perfect, hate to see it end! It gets pretty cold and rainy here in the winter. I'm determined that I will bundle up and get outside instead of staying in the house so much this winter. We have a couple days left of warm weather then some not-so-warm so I'll try and do some work in the yard and on the house outside. Pat's on strike with Boeing but is still over in the Puget Sound area doing some work on our trailer, etc. I've gone over there for the past 4 weekends. One of those weekends he redid my brakes on my car, something that was long overdue. Last weekend I had a blow-out on my car as you see from the picture here. In all my years of driving I don't think I've had a flat and never bothered to learn to change one. Luckily Pat said he would come there and change it, it was 11:30 at night on a dark highway about half-way between here and Seattle. A state patrol officer stopped to check on me and said he'd help me fix it but Pat was on his way. I was shocked when I got out of the car to look at it, could have turned out so much worse.

Last week it was my birthday and also my mom's and one of my sisters. Thankfully I don't feel any older than I already feel. I was making a quilt for my mom but didn't quite get it done by her birthday. Luckily I had bought her a set of cd's that she and dad liked. It's hard to stay inside and work on sewing when the weather is so nice. I've been doing alot of weeding and mowing outside and my blueberries are finally ripe enough to start picking them. Now that I'm thinking of it I'd better get out there and pick the ripe ones and also check the apple trees before the deer come by and start raiding them like they do.

It's been awhile again since I posted. I put a new picture of the house on here with it's new roof!! I thought it would never happen but we finally got it. The old shake roof was 30+ years old and had bats living under the shakes and I hate bats!! We had to get new skylights too but it was worth it in the end. We got opening skylights in the bedroom and upstairs bathroom which is nice when it's hot out but it never seems to get hot out here. This summer and last summer had very few hot days. I'm so glad I picked the 2 guys that ended up doing our roof. They are so nice and easy going and we ended up having them do other things too, like the lattice under the porches and deck, and doing some wiring in the garage, installed a "new" door in the garage (one I got for free a couple years ago) and put in a new window in the garage. We're going to have them do more but we're taking a break from it until we see if Pat goes on strike next week.

Mom is doing better so that's sure good. Her birthday is coming up soon, September 10th she'll be 83! I really need to finish this quilt I started last Fall for her. When she was in the nursing home last Fall she was talking about how much she loves the Fall colors and I decided then to give her this quilt. This picture of the unfinished quilt doesn't show the richness of the colors but you get the idea. It's also very, very soft with all flannels. I just need to finish tying it and do the binding and then I'll be done. I guess I'll end this posting here for now. I have so much to do today. Pat hasn't been home in weeks and I think he'll be coming home tonight or soon. He's going to do my brakes today. I left my car over there and brought his home a few days ago. My brakes were so bad I just couldn't drive it anymore. The rotor on the front drivers side had deep grooves in it.

Wow, it's been about 8 months since I've posted. So much has happened in that time and I doubt I'll remember it all.

The highlights are that my in-laws flew out here the first part of September and we went up to this resort in Canada where Pat and I spent our honeymoon almost 19 years ago. It's called Tigh-na-mara. We stayed in a log cabin and it was pretty cool. The bad thing was that by the time we got up there it was late evening, time for bed and we had to check out the next day in time to make the long drive back to Victoria, B.C. to catch our ferry. All in all we had lots of fun. I have pictures on here somewhere, will post when I find them.

In October my Mom had sort of a breakdown, I guess you'd call it, and ended up having to go into a nursing home but the good news is that she was much better by Christmas and Dad was able to bring her home to enjoy Christmas with him and stay there. According to Dad she's doing fine and she's seemed fine when I've seen her. It was all a very scary, very stressful time for all of us but I'm thankful that she's ok now. She went to a geriatric hospital for a couple weeks before the nursing home and it was so, so hard to see her like that. She kept begging me to get her out of there and there was nothing I could do.

Very soon after all this started with my Mom I found out that my ex-mother-in-law had cancer and it was pretty bad. Her husband took it very hard and within a couple days he had a heart attack and died. My son Shane, who's in the Army in Georgia, flew home for the funeral. It was sure nice to spend some time with him, I miss him so much! He got to spend some time with his grandma which was good because she died soon after too, about 3 weeks after her husband. They were such good, loving people and were so good to me when I married their son when we were 17.

I had what I had thought would be minor surgery for a cyst in November and had a really hard time getting better from that until the first part of January. Now here it is February and time is flying along. During all of January we had snow and ice the whole month but recently it's actually been fairly decent out although I saw that our neighbor still has some snow at his place where it had been kind of piled up. I saw buds on a flowering cherry tree this afternoon which gives me hope that it will be warmer soon. 2007 was the rainiest, coldest year we've had here, even all summer long. We had about 5 days of really nice weather around the 4th of July and that was it. Even my chickens seem to be happier lately since it's been getting nicer out.

I've been working on putting energy seal between the logs inside the house during the cold months and did some on the outside along with staining, etc when it was somewhat warm still during Fall. I've also been sanding the inside logs, and probably will still be working on that when I'm 80, very slow going.

I have to pick up Tim from a sports awards program at school but I will post some pictures on here soon and will also try to post what's going on in my life.

I was looking through some of my pictures to put one on here and found this one. It's a very old one lane bridge, over 100 yrs old. People have to stop when they get to it and see if somebody is already on it and take turns. They're supposed to be building a new one but I guess the estimates are way too high so I don't know if it will happen. The new bridge was supposed to also have a pedestrian bridge underneath to link the Olympic Discovery Trail. There's a beautiful view of the Elwha River from the bridge, even more gorgeous in the Fall.

I've been having alot of medical tests but things are looking better. One was from an abnormal mammogram so I had to go in for more pictures and an ultrasound the other day and it turned out it's just multiple cysts. Kind of scared me when they came in and asked me what age my Dad's sister was when she had breast cancer. I also switched from my beloved doctor over in Renton, 3 hrs from here, to a dr in town but I don't like this new one at all so I guess I'm back to trying to find one who's taking new patients and is on our insurance network. I've been driving to Renton for the past 5 years to see my dr but with all the medical stuff that's come up this year it was getting to be too much.

Tim is bored to death now that he's on summer vacation. The friends he made from school have been busy so far. He did get invited to a 4th of July party though. We need to find out if the parents will be home, etc and we always shoot off fireworks here and also go into town to watch those but I told him we'd try and work something out. Pat's off work all next week. The kids badly want to do something in the way of a vacation thing. I'm sure Pat will just want to spend the week around home. It makes it even harder because of Thunder's seizures. He went about a month with none and then a week or two ago he had a bad day where he had 3. We raised his Phenobarb dose but the vet says we can't go much higher.

Update 8/2/2007
The bridge pictured above was closed today, a month earlier than they were going to, because of the bridge accident in Minneapolis. It was scheduled to be torn down next month anyway and then the replacement bridge will be built but will take 2 years to build. I'm glad they decided not to take any chances with it but will miss the beautiful views from it, especially in the Fall.

I didn't really have much in the way of new pictures right now but I like this one that I downloaded from MaryJanes site. My Dad made me a chicken house that I just love, partly because it's just what I wanted and needed but mostly because my Dad made it. I'm going to take a picture of it, should have last week and now it's raining. The Silkies love their new house! I gave the Buttercups the Silkies old house and they love that too.

I'm finally getting some medical appts done and found out last week that I have a cyst and had an ultrasound yesterday to see if there's anything else going on. It's weird how unsurprised I was about the cyst. It seems more and more these days that if I just trust my gut feelings I know more than I would have thought. I don't know if that makes sense. I've been so sleep deprived lately. Today is Tim's last day at his Tuesday school and then after school and this evening is a dinner and "project fair" to celebrate their last day. I will miss this school as much as Tim, maybe more. I started him in this one day a week school last September to let him start being around more kids his age after homeschooling him for 6 years and he loved it so much he would count the days and hours till the next Tuesday so I enrolled him in public school for the other 4 days. He has done better than I ever would have dreamed! He even was on the honor roll recently! He still gets help from the special ed teacher in a couple areas and as they say, he processes information slowly but he loves school more than any other 13yr old I've ever met and I always get glowing reports about how hard he tries, etc. We went on a whale watching field trip with the Tuesday school a few weeks ago and had a wonderful time! I'm not crazy about small boats and the water but the water was like glass and it was a sunny day. The next week we went on a field trip to Victoria B.C. with Tim's other school and again, had a blast! The weather couldn't have been better. The view of Port Angeles as we were heading back is breath taking! The end of next week is the last day of school at his regular school. I am going to be loving not setting an alarm clock all summer!!!

The dr said I most certainly have asthma and wants me to have a pulmonary work-up so I need to set that up. I have an appt with a regular dr in town next week so I can get referrals to some of these other drs. I fought changing my dr from the one in the south Seattle area but it just needed to be done. Dr Toulouse has been my dr for many years but it's too hard to know a month or more ahead whether I'll be able to make the 3hr drive over there.

Other than the medical worries life is good and I find myself thinking very often how blessed I am. All four of my kids seem to be doing well. The weather has been improving and that sure improves my mood.

Today is my Mom and Dad's 56th wedding anniversary! They are two very amazing people and I'm so proud of them.