please say a prayer for gma h. we got a call this morning that she somehow fell out of her wheelchair and broke her femur. they took her into surgery this afternoon to put pins in, which worried us quite a bit since she is ninety-seven years old. they ended up putting screws in her hip and knee and a steel rod along her entire femur. she made it through the surgery fine (what a blessing!) and is in recovery. we are waiting to hear when she is awake again. i’m sure it’ll be a difficult recovery at her age so all the prayers she can get will surely help. all of that aside, we have been having fun here with our friends. we spent most of the day yesterday on the beach. it was a beautiful day. one of those rare days when you can actually sit in the sun and not sweat to death. there was frisbee-throwing and football-throwing and hole-digging and castle-building and beach-running and sun-napping. we then went and swam around the pool for a while and warmed up in the hot tub before coming back up for dinner. before i had dinner done, the kids and jeremy were asleep on the couch. one of the girls’ head kept falling on the table all through dinner. they were more than happy to go to bed at an early hour. us adults managed to stay awake until 21:00 before happily dragging ourselves to bed. speaking of bed, i am so far very pleased with my latex mattress. friday night, we only ended up with three hours of sleep so that wasn’t the best to judge by, but last night was very comfortable. after a night and a half of sleeping on it, i have not had any shoulder aches or body parts falling asleep. see, i’m a side sleeper so i have a terrible time with my shoulders and hips hurting and having to flip to the other side every twenty minutes until that one starts hurting too. that’s where a lot of my tossing and turning comes from. as an extension of that, my arms and hands and legs will fall asleep on me. that’s a big part of the reason i was adamently against getting an inner-spring matress. the latex, like the visco foam, is supposed to virtually eliminate pressure points. so far, it seems to be doing the trick. it comes with a thirty-day trial period so i’ve got that long to decide whether it’s going to work out. my next priority purchase is going to be curtains. until i have curtains, there’s really no way to know for sure whether i’m sleeping well in the morning. enough of that, a rainy afternoon at the beach means we’re all headed to dinner and the movies. i don’t know why they don’t want to watch a movie on our 20″ tv.

i don’t know about you, but it has been farookin gorgeous here the last few days. playing football on the beach has been not-too-hot. swimming in the pool has been not-too-cold. lovely, it is. and, our home is coming together nicely. stuff is actually jumping out of boxes and into cozy little put-up spaces. we haven’t made any more progress on those other six chairs but, when we do, the dining area will be beeyooteefuwl! on a side note, it amuses me to look down on the coast guard and military helicopters and planes that fly by. most of the time, it doesn’t seem like we’re that high up.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SANDRA!!! the good news is that good things are happening finally. today, we were the happy recipients of a microwave and dishwasher – only thirty-eight days after we bought them! we got the microwave installed and it looks very pretty. we started on the dishwasher but we seem to be in need of an elbow so it will have to wait a few days for us to go out again. we are told that our stove and stacking kit for our w/d will arrive friday. keep your fingers crossed for us. it sure will be nice to have a complete kitchen again and not have to decide on dinner based on what will cook in a toaster oven (or now microwave). saturday we went on a furniture shopping expedition and i believe we found the mattress set and bed that we want. hubby will be calling to haggle prices make purchases tomorrow. (i am so not a negotiator) we also found a bed for the bunk room that we love but we’re unsure that it will be a good fit in such a small room. it’s so cool looking though. unfortunately, the dining room table that we hearted so much that my boy almost bought it without any prodding from me last year is gone. there is a similar one at a slightly higher price but we’re not sure we like the two-tonedness of it. the only other one we’ve found that we like though is $500 higher for the same setup so we’ll likely get over the two-tone dislike. we have also taken the time the last two days to remind ourselves why we moved here and that all of this is worthwhile. we’ve been playing frisbee and football on the beach and we’ve been utilizing the pool and hot tub. it’s been wonderful. we also started back into the gym this weekend. life is starting to take on a semblance of normalcy. i’m ready for normal.

we packed a lot into this weekend. saturday morning, the men folks had a man-project going on. once they were to a point where i could steal my man, we went to my dad’s for a visit and Christmas exchange. we had a great visit and dinner with them and then we left to meet up with jenny and some of her friends. they were at a little greek restaurant around the corner from her new place so we stopped there to meet up with them. we were there a few minutes when a guy came up behind me and put his arm around me and said, “i knew it was you when you walked through the door.” folks, this was very, very exciting for me. i know that i’m a weirdo and all but i have been confounded over the fact that i grew up and went to school and worked in orlando and have NEVER run into anyone i know since i’ve left. this was a guy that i worked with almost TWELVE years ago! he remembered and recognized me from when i was fifteen years old. i was amazed and so pleased. it really made my weekend. i’m probably revealing my crazy here, but the part that really excited me was not so much running into someone from my past, but that someone that i knew for a matter of months over a decade ago would bother to remember me. i’ve alluded to it in past rants that a good portion of my thoughts are thinking about people in my past and wondering how they are and who they are now. perhaps it’s kind of creepy but it’s what i do. and i often wonder whether i’ve ever made a big enough impact on people’s lives that maybe they would think of me once in a while. so for a guy to remember me by name after twelve years – well, it made me happy. and no, there is no chance that he only remembered me because of some romantic complication as he was several years older than me and batting for the other team so nothing like that existed between us. /tangent. so when we got to the restaurant, jenny and friends were finishing up and waiting for their checks so we weren’t there long before heading back to her place. we got there and played scattergories for several hours and ended up getting back home around 0100. sunday morning, i slept in a bit while my man got up early to continue the man project started the day before. they finished early in the afternoon and we headed out to see my brother. we stopped along the way to get an oversized birthday cookie for him since i doubt i’ll see him on his birthday wednesday. we got there and sang happy birthday to him and gave them their Christmas present and watched some football and chatted for a couple hours. we then headed to katie’s for a couple hours before heading back. this morning, my hubby left me for a business trip. he’ll be gone for four days. i’m taking advantage of being husbandless by making arrangements to help jenny with being a bride. it should be a good time.

yesterday was a nightmare migraine day. i emailed my boss around lunchtime, took a handful of motrin, wrapped my head in a blanket and slept all afternoon. i woke up just in time for our after-hours conference call and managed to drag my computer into my lap to get dialed in. i took more motrin and made it through the call. i made it through dinner and guitar hero III and a tv show and took more motrin before bed. this morning, thankfully, the migraine is gone and the headache is mostly gone. that means it’s going to be a great friday, right? it’s just as well that yesterday was a bust since the plans we had for last night got blown off. wednesday was good though; we had a fun night with my cousin. we walked over there after dinner to poke some cards but ended up poking balls instead. i’m pleased to say that even though i’m about the sorriest billiard player around, i managed to win two games. we even wii’d a little before heading back home that night. i’m not sure what we’ll be doing tonight. i was going to make calls last night to try to get some plans going for tonight and sunday but the migraine kept me from getting very far with that. i think i made one unsuccessful call and sank back into the couch to watch more ghiii. we’ll come up with something. if nothing else, it’s family pizza and movie night here.

i’m just worn out. after a very tiring week of attempting to get settled in the new place (no, we aren’t even close), we drove all night friday to orlando. we got in after midnight and were up again at 0730 to get ready for a day at disney. let me tell you, disney with three kids is tiring enough but adding car fatigue and too little sleep on top of it… exhausting. it was a good day though. we did the magic kingdom and the chilluns experienced several firsts. both boys rode space mountain for the first time. this was an especially momentous feat for the younger boy who has not been very adventurous with big rides since he’s been tall enough for them. he was behind me but i was told he even held his arms up! all three kids rode thunder mountain and enjoyed it. all three kids also did the haunted mansion, although two regretted that decision afterward. there was a new interactive monsters inc® show that yours truly got called upon to take part in. it was cute and highly embarrassing. i don’t do well with being put on the spot. at least i remembered my name and sense of humor (yes, i have one!). when the sun set, the castle was lit up much, much prettier than i have ever seen it in my life. it truly was something to behold. at the end of the night, my bro-n-law complained about nobody asking him what ride he wanted to do. we humored him and went into the carousel of progress. while i appreciate the nostalgic value of this attraction, i’ll admit that i have not been in it since i was a kid and really hadn’t thought about it since either. i figured it was long gone and didn’t care. if you’ve never been in it, it was walt disney’s own vision, which he presented at the ’64 new york world’s fair. it has animatronic tableaus of the how the typical american family uses technology from the turn of the 20th century forward, complete with an annoyingly cheerful jingle-song between each. anyhow, you get the picture on why it’s not the most popular attraction at disney anymore. so we’re on the second scene (the 1920’s) and the annoying song is sung and the seats start to spin us toward the third scene (the audience seating moves, not the stage) when a strange noise is made and we stop moving. the song finishes and scene two starts again! everyone in the theatre is amused by this and making commentaries throughout the scene. an agitated male voice keeps coming over the speakers advising that, for our own safety, everyone should stay in their seats PLEASE. and then the annoying music starts up but we move not at all. and then scene two plays again. and the mass-psychosis is already setting in as we all get silliar and silliar. a woman suddenly jumps up and runs back to the exit door. she looks back at us long enough to say that there’s a way out before disappearing forever as the agitated voice comes on again reminding us that our safety hinges on us staying seated. we audibly wonder if she made it to freedom. and the annoying music starts again. and you can just hear all of our sanity congealing into a pile of mush on the floor. as scene two starts up again, there is talk of a riot. about halfway through the scene, just as the overloaded fuse is about to blow sending the house and then the neighborhood into darkness, the agitated voice pipes up to tell us that they are experiencing technical difficulties (really?) and will have to evacuate the theatres (freedom!!!) and please stay seated (huh? how are we evacuating while seated?). a teenage boy dressed in an embarrasing disney costume appears out of nowhere and leads us (in the dark because they chose that part of the scene to evacuate) all to the exit door and down a corridor to freedom. all told, we were in that theatre for more than thirty minutes with that song and scene playing all the while. it really could have only been worse to be stuck in “it’s a small world afterall” hell. in all my giddyness, i admitted that was the most fun i had had all day. with a couple more stops for restrooms and popcorn, we left the park and made it home around midnight. yesterday we met up with my cousin who helped us on errands such as buying my sis’ Christmas gift and finding dishes in ikea. we managed to have our gift exchange with my sis and her family last night. the kids all seemed very pleased with their gifts, my sis and bro-n-law were ecstatic with their blue man group tickets, and we received many wonderfully fun things. it was a fun weekend but oh so tiring. i need a nap.