Those. BASTARDS.

Which bastards, you might ask? The ones at Fox, the ones involved in any way with the show "24". Those are the bastards. They're bastards for making me believe that the new season of 24 had begun, that new episodes were a week away, following the "premiere" of the 24 "movie". But no, I was a fool, mislead--nay, deluded--to believe my regular Jack fix was coming. Not so. New episodes in one week? Two? Three? Okay, maybe December? NO! I have to wait until the middle of friggin' January!

AAAAARRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!!

But I guess lots of people have been waiting. Now we continue to wait. Ah. If only there was something to keep me occupied in the meantime. Well, there are new episodes of "Storm Chasers" on Discovery channel for a while. That's pretty cool. And new episodes of "Mythbusters." What else? There isn't much TV that we watch while it airs. Most of it we rent on DVD later, like "Deadwood", "Big Love", even "The Office" and "Prison Break." It's just easier to watch TV on our own time. And then we don't have to worry about missing episodes or filling up the DVR.

>>>>>>>>>>>


On another note, E's birthday party went off well, even though I stressed over it like you wouldn't believe. I guess I felt extra pressure since his last birthday ended early when the pizza place was evacuated when the place filled with smoke and the fire department arrived. Not the birthday we planned.

This one was horribly last minute. Really. I went shopping for party supplies about 8:30 pm the night before the party, getting home after 11:00. And I was literally finishing the cake as guests were arriving! E had a sore throat the day before, so we weren't sure if we should cancel. But that would be disappointing, too. So we went full steam ahead and had a party. He had missed some earlier parties, too, so he really wanted to have his. About 7 or 8 kids showed up, and my friend G and her husband. It was fun, even though it didn't go as planned. The games and bowling we planned went by the wayside as kids swarmed my son's bedroom and played with my husband. Parents started by watching their kids carefully, but then settled on the sofa for conversation. It ended up being more of a playdate with cake, but it was low-stress for everyone. And E had a good time. And a lot of the kids left quite reluctantly, so I guess they had fun, too. And parents got some time off, thanks to my husband. He probably expected to be relieved by me at one point, but I wasn't walking into that tornado. He was great, though, and the kids liked playing with him. He's really good with kids, in spite of having no real father for a role model. I love him so much.

Stuff is still going wrong. One new thing after another. Our ceiling is now dripping water from something upstairs in the master bath, we still haven't rented our place, and we really don't want to have to move to a smaller apartment. It just makes it harder. We have a new place ready to go, still nice, but smaller. Not quite as nice as this place, but new and close to E's school. No more rooftop patio and views of the mountains. I'll miss that. Small kitchen. Only 2 bedrooms and 1 1/2 baths. Still, we need to save the money, and we really need to find new tenants for this place we can no longer afford. Hubby C might have renegged his pay, so hopefully there won't be such a strain to afford health insurance. We'll see what they say.

I hate stressing over money, especially at the holidays. It's really depressing. But we're going to do our best to make it fun for E anyway, even though he misses Texas a lot. He probably misses the financial security we had there. And we owned a home. I hated being in the middle of nowhere with nothing but scrubby dead-looking grass around. No trees. Just sick cattle and tornadoes. Bleh. I speak of north Texas, of course, and not south and central Texas, which I love.


OK, I guess I'll head off to get some work done. As soon as I get some new batteries for my camera I can post birthday pics of E! You know how I love my boy!

Cheers,
R

Long time, no see . . .

OK, I admit it. I'm a bad blogger. Bad bad bad. But life has been particularly consuming lately, especially in the past month or so. Yeah, I've been suffering through the depression thing, but what's new, really? That part never changes, probably never will. It's okay, I guess, I'll just keep working on it, it's all I can do. But what's particularly different is everything else.

I mentioned the move from Texas to the Los Angeles area, mentioned that I was still feeling blah in spite of new treatment options. The medications are still being tinkered with. Overall, I think I like living here, although there are things I hate. I think living in Burbank has helped that a bit, since people here seem more family-friendly and less shallow. I prefer that, honestly. Some people might even say it's more BORING in Burbank, but I don't care. I'm not a "night life" person anyway. I just shop, go out to eat, take my son to the park, that kind of thing.

The worst happenings lately have been that E got ill, seriously ill. He had the incredulous diagnosis of "scarlet fever"! I kid you not. I was shocked, even doubtful. But after reading about it, it makes sense. His fever just wouldn't go away, and he did have the redness I've read about. He got better, but it took 2 weeks for him to return to school. The sore throat was the part that lasted longest. Then the DAY he gets the diagnosis, my husband comes home with bad news.

C: I had an interesting day, too.
BH: Oh, really? What happened?
(no pause)
C: I got laid off today.
BH: That's not funny. You'd better be kidding.
C: I wish I was kidding.

So the drama continued. Now we can't afford our apartment, time to move to a smaller, cheaper place. Cutting back on expenses. Still trying to figure out how to pay for health insurance. No more plans to visit family in Texas for the holidays.

I am more angry than anything, that C's boss would relocate us out here, then give him almost no notice (4 days?) to find a new job. I mean, we thought we did the right thing. C turned down a job with much higher pay to take a "permanent" staff position with benefits. We thought we were doing the right thing, as a family with a young child, by picking the job that seemed the most stable. How could we have been so wrong? I mean, DID we do something wrong? Blame it on the economy, but we still wanted to keep ourselves out of this situation as much as possible. We tried to be smart. We tried . . .

Eh, I'm tired of thinking about it. Now I have to plan my son's birthday party, which will be nothing like the (still small-scale, but) bigger party we promised him. And we're frantically trying to find tenants to take over our lease so we can move, much as we don't want to. C's looking for work, I'm hoping to find a job, somehow. It won't be fun working on weekends, not seeing my husband. My parents got divorced that way. Don't know what else to do, though. We just have to survive now.

If you haven't just been brought down big time by this post, save yourself and find another blog quickly, one with lots of pretty pictures and maybe some baby bunnies. Hopefully we'll be doing okay, the new place won't smell like dead raccoons or have remnants of police-line tape stuck to the door. Good luck to all of us.

R