Updates

Been a bit since I have blogged anywhere, so I figure I had best take advantage of what time I have and get at least SOME sort of update down.....

Something I hope I can someday remedy by the way. I've found that the more I write anything down in some form of journal, the easier it gets. It also helps to take a step back and look at life once in awhile. :-)

Where to begin.....

Well early part of this year we finished our first actual home rennovation project by replacing our tub and wall unit (which had cracked). Which then led into repainting. Which then lead into redoing the flooring. Which led into redoing the hardware.... By the end, two months had passed, I could tell my stepfather, who had volunteered to help us replace our bathtub, was getting a tiny bit frustrated at wasting his weekends at our house, and we are pretty sure everything is working more or less the way it should. I can't say we exactly increased the value of our home (aside from no longer having a cracked bathtub), but I got to actually do things a homeowner should do (like plumbing and spackling and swearing a lot and spending a borkload of money), and our more polite guests claim our bathroom looks halfway decent.

In February I hit the one year mark on my nasty headaches. They got bad enough that I went to see a neurologist, who eventually sent me in to get an MRI. Thankfully it came back negative, and we are now looking at it being neck issues that are translating up into my head. I've tried adjustment, which sorta worked, and exercises, which sorta work, and lately have been doing acupuncture AND adjustments, which sorta works better than either of the other two. Yay for Eastern medicine!

In May, my wife and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary. You'd think we would be buying each other insane gifts and going on huge romantic trips, but with the bathroom money pit, we decided to take a few days off and not tell anybody we weren't going anywhere. We didn't answer the phone for the 4 day weekend and stayed around home and ate out and shopped around here. I'm not sure how Brandi feels, but to me, it was pretty memorable anyways. :-)

June saw my birthday, and with it a surprise party. Brandi actually planned a huge party with a lot of people and food and such and I didn't find out more than that SOMEthing was going on. Sure it was essentially my birthday present, but hell I've never had a surprise party before, so it was pretty damn cool. Then we hit July and since I couldn't very well throw her a huge party back, I bought her an above-ground swimming pool, which she's wanted for a very very long time. Making up for creativity with money....the way of the American Husband.

I learned a couple things with this pool. First off.....don't buy a used pool and believe the rummage sale lady when she says "Oh all this stuff is pretty self-explanatory" as a way to cover up the lack of instructions. Sure plugging everything into the right holes is easy enough, but the rest can be a pain figuring out. Secondly, your yard is NOT as level as you think it is. We had the damned thing half full and it was stretching into an alarming oval shape until the side gave out and started spilling hundreds of gallons (I wish I was kidding) of water into our yard at 2AM. I was dumb enough to go out and check on it, and spent the next half hour bailing out the yard directly downhill from the pool, praying it wouldn't wash out what little grass I had left.

Next day and the other side of the yard, we had the thing up and filled and all the equipment set up, and I then got to play chemist with the water, trying to get it just right for swimming. Remember when you were a kid and spent all day running through the hose water? Well apparently now it's full of Very Bad Things, requiring us to buy Very Expensive Chemicals to kill them all.

In all seriousness, it wasn't so bad compared to the fun we got out of it the rest of the summer. I couldn't get her out of that pool until September. So all in all, it wasn't the worst present, and I promised not to be too bitter about the huge circle of dead grass in my backyard.....

September saw us through one of the bigger changes of our year.....Brandi's gastric bypass surgery. Health issues and our hopes of starting a family kind of brought us to this decision. I spent a day in the hospital waiting room with her parents waiting and checking a computer screen every ten minutes, and eventually she woke up and was assigned a room. She was wheeled into the room, barely awake, and I waved at her from the hallway and she smiled.

My wife and I have our problems, but seeing her alive and safe and allright and smiling at me was the best I'd felt this year. I had no idea how worried I was until I knew she was okay.

We spent three days in the hospital where she slept a lot and I thankfully got wireless on my laptop and was on WoW for 8 hours+ a day, and then we got home and the hard part started. Diets and medicines and sickness and weird comlplicated instructions and pain and KNOWING that I couldn't screw anything up or she'd get even more sick. Sadly looking back on it I know things were actually going very WELL for her, but it sure didn't feel like it at the time.

Still, now she's 70(!!) lbs lighter, and DEFINITELY doing better. The biggest thing I have noted? She parks at the back of the parking lot now. We used to spend forever circling for a parking spot close to whatever store or resteraunt we were heading towards, but now she is more than happy to park towards the back if there are no spots and hoof it. I could literally not be more proud of her.

Halloween we attended a haunted house and adult party held at our Washington Pavillion's Kirby Science and Discovery Center. The haunted house was okay (you could tell it was the first year running it), and the party was very interesting. Adults in a kiddie science center are always fun to watch, but add in ALCOHOL and it was classic. People would be clustered around the exhibits marvelling at things we've all seen before (or we SHOULD have if our schools were any good) and just FASCINATED by it all. Me...I was fascinated by the costumes. Not only the naughty ones (though there were more than a few)...but seeing Imhotep walking around with Cleopatra, standing behind two Hillbilies and next to a deadhead (literally) was just.....FUN. I am an absolute NUT for Halloween, and actually doing something for the holiday was awesome. I think the wife got into it a bit too. We hit the costume shops on Nov 1, and have procured ourselves a couple costumes for next year. :-)

So I have to say it's been a pretty good year going into the holiday season. Good anniversary, good birthday, and a good Halloween? Hey I can't complain.