..nearly 4 years, to be exact.  4 years since I was last here, 4 years since I blogged here. Some things have changed, some have stayed the same.  I'm still married.  I still have 3 kids.  One just finished her freshman year of college, one is in the juvenile detention facility, and one is in high school and struggling to NOT follow in his brother's footsteps. I live in Kansas now.  I'm somewhat of a local celebrity because I'm renovating a 19t...

Apparently I've been a VERY good girl this year, because Santa left me lots of nice things under the tree, My husband collaborated with the Man in Red and they got me a Garmin.  It's going to be a huge benefit when I'm doing stuff for hospice; I won't have to rely on Mapquest or google maps to get me around.  The one I got is a portable one too, so I'll be able to carry it in my pocket should I want to wander around town. My babies got me some perfume and body lotion from the Gap...

Dear The Internets, Today was not a good day.  First, My Momma had to take the Littlest Kid to see DocVee.  I dunno what DocVee is, but when they came home, the Littlest Kid had a sore arm and My Momma said he had to get Shot.  I know what Shot is; my friend Rocky who used to live next door went hunting with his People sometimes and he said that Shot is what happens when People point a big stick at other animals and make it go BANG and then the animal they pointed it ...

It is I, Gracie.  I am back again today because I don't gots to be in my room and My Momma is busy doing something with this white box that makes all kinds of slooshy water noises.  She's putting those things that peoples wear over their fur every day in it, and then she puts some runny smelly stuff in there too.  I dunno why you peoples don't have much fur - do you haves flees?  I had a flea once.  My Momma founded one on my belly, and then her and My Dave putted me in ...

This happened 2 years ago: The same thing happened tonight, but this time it's much, much worse.  He has barely any tooth left on his left side and not much on his right (he won't let me post a photo of it, bless him).  I don't think that they can be fixed so easily this time...I have a feeling that a partial or some crowns might be necessary until he's done growing and is old enough to have implants put in.  The good news is that we have dental insurance.  He wa...

Dear Bitches, I want you to know that I'm forever going to remember what you did today.  For-fucking-ever.  Your lack of humanity, your total and utter lack of care and concern for the person you loosely call your 'patient' will forever be my Gold Standard - of how NOT to behave, of how NOT to treat another human being.  I want you to know how close I came to punching one of you in your gold-toothed-gum-snapping-mouth when you stripped that little old lady of all of her clo...

Plastic - or cosmetic - surgery for celebrities has been a common thing for quite some time now, often with poor results.  Nicole Kidman looks like a Klingon because she's had so much Botox injected into her forehead, Tara Reid had HORRIBLE breast implants with scarring around her areolas (remember the 'oops! my boobie fell out!' moment on the red carpet, anyone?) and her so much liposuction on her abdomen it looked like some pre-school kid's experiment with modelling clay, and lets not for...

I had to go see a physician this morning.  I've been having some disturbing symptoms - muscle fasiculations (twitching) in my hands, fingers, arms, legs, feet, toes, lips and tongue, feeling dizzy and off-balance a lot and extreme fatigue (so bad that I have a hard time making it up the stairs at home some days) are the main ones - and I wanted to get it checked out.  I know my body pretty well and I know that something's just not right, so I called last week and made an appointme...

I'm almost at the end of the classroom part of the course I'm taking.   In a couple of weeks we'll be doing clinicals, and then, at the start of December...we'll be done. I've been thinking about what I want to do next.  The nursing program at the college I currently attend is full until Fall of 2009, so that's out of the question.  I just don't have that kind of time.  So, I've been looking for alternitives.  And, I've found one.  There's another college ab...

I have a pretty good 'gut' instinct.  I know when someone isn't being totally truthful with me; when they're not all that they claim to be - and when they're fabricating things that they've done and places that they've been. I've had my eye on someone in my life for a while now.  They started off small, with little white lies here and there, intermingled with truth so as to disguise them better.  When people didn't notice - or didn't call them out on them - the lies got bigger....

Although I've been knitting for 30 years, there's something I've never tried. Knitting socks from the toe up. Most of the sock patterns I have require that you start from the top and work your way down.  Bascially, you cast on 60-ish stitches, join them together to form a round, and knit a tube.  You separate your stitches for the heel and when you're done working that back and forth, you join the whole thing back together to form another tube and knit until your sock is long eno...

I had first written this in response on another thread Link but decided that the subject deserved an entire article instead. When Dave and I first got married, he was an Airman First Class - just two ranks above Airman Basic, the lowest enlisted rank of the Air Force.  I was pregnant with our second child, and we already had an almost-two year old.  I wasn't working, so we relied upon his income to feed, house and clothe all three of us.  Needless to say, we cou...