The “Oh, Crap!” Stage in Life

Dear Readers:
We are in the “Oh, Crap!” stage of life right now. When I look at the outside circumstances, I’m not sure how it’s all going to work out. I have so many irons in the fires and hats on my head, that my brain is a constant whirlwind that’s seemingly never productive.

And this is how I feel. (Brace yourself for a very disturbing and unflattering photo of yours truly.)

I find myself doing this a lot-silently, of course, so as not to scare the kittens. However, I try to remind myself of the blessings that I don’t deserve and for some reason, that I’ve received.

I live in an amazing country, I have a roof over my head and am married to my best friend. So what if everything is changing once again, just when I got used to the way it worked? Wah.

I suppose that’s called life. And I suppose I should just get used to it.
I mean, we haven’t had a house blow up yet this year, so we’re doing pretty good. Right?

Weird Reasons to be Thankful

Thanksgiving is creeping in. Let’s be thankful.

I am thankful that I didn’t die when my house exploded. (Full Story Here.)

 
I am thankful for the amazing banana bread that I love to make-and eat. (Recipe here.)

 

I am thankful that even when things in life appear to be prickly, beauty can be found at the end.

 

I am thankful that I had this weird cat for eight years of my life. R.I.P. Cowboy.

 

And, I am thankful that Biceps convinced me to sell one of our houses by tempting me with a trip to Europe.

What are your weird reasons to be thankful?

The Blown Up House ‘Remodel’-Past, Present & Blown Up

Meth Lab?

This was the first house my hubby purchased-before I knew him. He lived here with his band mates and a couple of other ruffians. I moved in after we were married and we lived here for three years. It was a duplex with great rental income. Then, a good friend of my husband’s stopped by.

And….blew it up. ‘How’, you might ask?

When a friend named Beau, a mattress and a gas line intertwine, what you get is a recipe for disaster. And then when the heater kicks on…KABOOM!

(Although, it looks like silk hanging from the broken window panes…they were at one time-mini blinds.) To top it off, this happened during Christmas. Both sides of our families were visiting. Nothing says ‘Merry Christmas’ like a blown-up house. Kayle’s dad laughed when he saw it. His mother cried. I cried. Then I started laughing. But had to pretend to be crying so the cops didn’t get suspicious.

The good news was that we got a great Christmas card pic out of this disaster. The house made it onto the local news and even into the paper.

We had a lot of memories from this wonderful moment in time; with family and concerned neighbors standing by our sides drinking coffee as firemen retrieved our singed possessions and portions of rock continued to fall off the side of the house, etc…. We thought of printing t-shirts with the picture above and a caption that read, “I survived Christmas with the Greiman’s in 2004.” I think it would sell. We ended up selling the remnants of the house and our lot to a developer. He’s done a pretty fine job fixing it up. One would never know that the house had blown up, unless they read this.