The smell of eggs cooking in the morning makes me puke (sorry Honey, now you know the real reason I never eat your eggs!).  Which is a problem because I really love eggs.  Once in awhile when I am too stressed to eat breakfast without causing myself an upset stomach, or in just too big of a hurry doing everything else that I forget to eat, I’ll stop by Jack-in-the-Box for a Breakfast Jack (A breakfast Jack is a hamburger bun, fried egg, slice of ham, slice of cheese, voila!).  If the bun were 1/2 thinner on each side and you took off the cheese, this could be the best breakfast in the universe!  However, I digress.  The real reason for today’s post is this:

Brothers and Sisters, Ladies and Gentlemen, can I get a “WHAT. THE. HELL????”  FRIED Macaroni and cheese?  Ok, first of all, it’s not even real cheese!  I don’t care what that label says, IT’s NOT!!  It might have 1% real cheese in it just like that Guacamole Dip has less than 2% avocado!  Secondly, this is causing all kinds of nightmares, and I’m not even asleep!  I may need lots of therapy over this.  Just looking at this photo can cause heart attacks!

I think I now know the meaning of ‘distraught’.

• I got up at 7:00 this morning after the most horrible night’s sleep, EVER, (which is very, very late in this house!) and not only made the lunches but showered, too!
• No children were harmed in the dropping off at school this morning (which is only news because Honey had a meeting and I had to sit in the car with the kids until the gate opened).
• Despite being ravishingly hungry, I walked straight into the apartment and loaded up the dishwasher and cleaned up some other stuff before plopping myself down to blog and watch movies all morning.
• I did homework.  On a Saturday.  That right there should be the most telling sign of all!
• I plan to go to school next month instead of Enrichment night on the 18th.
• Without any cussing, I fixed my IE so I can watch netflix online (because they are too retarded to make it so I can watch instantly using Firefox).
• I went to bed at 10:45 last night.  That’s like, two hours early!!!
• I have vowed to hate the Twilight movie if indeed that is the real reason HP7 has been postponed until next summer.
• I enjoyed spending the evening with all three of my kids last night.  At the same time.

Driving home from WW yesterday (where, incidentally, I lost 4.6 lbs!), I received some grievous news.

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince“ has been moved from November 21, 2008 to July 17, 2009.

Excuse me while I go into mourning.

I met with a new shrink today.  She told me I’m not bipolar.

?!?!?!?!?!?!

I guess that’s good.  And by visiting with her, I can see just how un-helpful my past doctors have been.  It seems as though being crazy is a full-time job, though.  I have individual counseling sessions, something called a Cog-T class (weekly), psych appts. to work on the meds, and family therapy.  Add that to my already busy schedule of weekly addiction recovery meetings, school, and volunteering at Honey’s classroom and I’m discovering I may not have enough time for that job at Borders like I was hoping to!

In other news….

That house we have an offer on might not be “the one”.  We’re considering another house we visited this week.  It has more room and a fantastic patio.  Also, a pool!  We might not be able to get that up and running right away, but the startup costs are cheaper than the putting-a-pool-in-in-the-first-place ones!

I started school today.  Went to my Algebra class this morning.  Had the most intense case of deja-vu EVER.  Which usually indicates I’m having a panic attack, but instead of being freaked out (ok, right after a minor freakout) I started thinking to myself, “SWEET!  I already know all of this stuff she’s talking about!”

Never fear, I will freak out on the exams.  But as far as the course material and homework go… I’m set.  I could probably do 2/3 of the homework for the semester in a matter of days.  (She gave us a list of all the problems and assignments with their due dates from now until Finals).

Once upon a time I was engaged to a man that is not my husband.

I loved him very much.  He knew I wouldn’t marry outside the temple, so he took the missionary discussions.  Turns out, he was what you’d call a “golden” contact.  The missionaries thought they were being set up at first, but no, he really was all that.

I flew out to North Carolina for his baptism.  I remember how special it was.  Apparently, it never (or rarely) snows in Greensboro, but never fear… I brought winter with me!  Roads were unplowed, because why would they have the resources to plow roads that virtually never needed plowing?  Accidents everywhere, people hoarding things from the stores, businesses and schools shut down.  You’d have thought the world was ending.  The amount of snowfall?  Maybe six inches, spread out over two days.

A short while after returning home to Utah, we broke up.  It was painful and confusing.  I don’t remember why, but that was the confusing part.  It had seemed so sudden and without warning.

Fast-forward 14 years and here I am, happily married to Honey.  Out of nowhere, I dreamt about Mr. X last night.

I don’t remember why, but Shana the Beautiful was with me, and we were trying to find him.  We were at his home, only it didn’t look like the place I had been.  It was very cluttered (completely opposite of the actual conditions), things were being packed up.  His family was there (mom, nieces, sisters, brothers) and had the unfortunate news that he had been brutally murdered just days before.  I was so overcome with grief I couldn’t talk or cry or anything.  My heart ached like nothing before.  His mom and sister (whom I never met, incidentally) were so kind.  They were trying to find a few of his things, and maybe a picture of him that I could take with me - only I didn’t recognize anything.  Everywhere I looked, nothing looked the same as I remember.  His family was actually very against his baptism.  I kept trying to skirt around asking if he had stayed active in the church, but I could tell by my surroundings that he had not.  The set of scriptures I had given him weren’t there, and there was material from other churches strewn about the room.  When they finally did find some pictures, one of them had him smoking a cigarette.  In real life, he hadn’t smoked.  But in this dream, he had given it up to be baptized.

Shana and I gathered our things and headed for home and I just cried all the way as she drove.

I’ve been wondering so many things since I woke up.  Why did I dream about this person?  I haven’t thought of him in some time.  Does this dream mean something?  Is it my subconscious’ psychic way of letting me know he’s died?  And why do I still care so much?  I would never trade what I have now for what might have been.  I love my husband, more than spoken words can say.

Any takers?

So, one of the things I did yesterday while D was at school was read the newspaper.  This in and of itself is nothing earth-shattering.  You probably don’t know because I’ve never talked about it here, but I’m a bit of a stargazer.  I mostly suck at it, but I just looooove to watch the night sky.  Right there, on the FRONT PAGE of the newspaper yesterday is a headline that says: “Stargazers, get your telescopes ready for tonight’s celestial light show.”  To which I would like to say, BULLOCKS!

“After midnight, look up in the northeast for the annual Perseid meteor shower, consistently one of the most spectacular celestial shows of the year.”

I told Honey that if we were up that late, which we likely would be despite the fact that I really am trying to go to bed by 10:35 p.m., we should go outside and watch.

So we did.

For 45 minutes.

I saw three shooting stars and he saw bupkus.

And now that I’ve gone back and re-read the article for the purposes of comlaining about it, I have another thing to add to the list.  Remember the headline?  About bringing out your telescopes?  “For the best view, don’t bother to set up a telescope — a meteor shower is best observed with your naked eye under a dark sky, blah blah blah MORE LIES!!”

And p.s. the shooting stars I saw?  NOT IN THE NORTHEAST, EITHER.

(50 million house points if you know who sings that, NO CHEATING!!!)

(Extra 50 if you know which movie house points is from, and I’ll just start off by saying it’s NOT Harry Potter!)

Cheese, cheese, bumblebees!

Here is my Baby D, all growed up and saving Kindergarten!  He told me to have a great day and he’d see me after lunch before we even left the house… and before I finished parking the car… and when I came to Honey’s classroom to help set up the name tags and “welcome back to school” gifties on the desks.

He wanted to make sure I got a good shot of his new backpack:

Let us not forget the love of all things Pirates!

(Note the skulls & crossbones on the straps!)

I was hoping to keep him from growing up a little longer.  If my kids get old, then I’ll get old.  Before you know it, I’ll be posting a picture of him looking like this…

I Hope They Call Me On A Mission

…only he’ll have on a suit and a different kind of name tag.

Last night, Honey set up some camp chairs outside so we could watch the sun set together.  It was so quiet, so peaceful… even D knocking on his bedroom window begging for a drink couldn’t ruin the evening.  Tonight was much the same, except we were at the Raingutter Regatta for Cub Scouts.  Once again, I forgot the camera.  I swear, I need to have one implanted!  It was so nice, though.  The boys all played well, and we had rootbeer floats for refreshments.

It’s been just the right amount of hot, and you can tell that fall is coming because it is getting dark sooner than it has been.  We’ve had a nice delta breeze to keep the heat stroke at bay, and the kids must sense change because not only are they going to bed “on time”, they’re not putting up a fight when we get them up in the morning.

Speaking of fall… I finally made the jump off the fence and bought a ticket to Time Out for Women in Sacramento.  It’s September 6th, which is the weekend we’d normally be trekking up to Apple Hill.  But Kenneth Cope is performing, and he’s so good…. Honey and I saw him in concert back before we had any crumb snatchers kiddos to worry about.  Since this interrupts our tradition of going to Apple Hill on the first weekend of September, we decided to further break tradition by inviting Shana the Beautiful’s family to go with us.

So what does any of that have to do with my title today?  It just sums up how complete I feel when I’m not engulfed in my illness.  I have the big picture hanging front and center and I am filled to the brim with serenity when I see me how my Father in Heaven sees me.

Good night, friends

What’s that called when you can’t get a song out of your head, an ear worm?  Here I am, three weeks later, and “Why, why, did I ever let you go-o?” is still running through my brain.  “Mamma Mia!  Here I go again!  My, my, how can I resist ya?”

At least it’s not the song that never ends.  It just goes on and on, my friend.  Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was and they’re forever singing it forever just because…