Potty Training
We still have issues with Kathleen, but today I am trying Samantha. We had a fit cause I didn't put a diaper on her, so the panties came off. We are now running around naked. I only hope my timer will remind me to sit her down on the potty, we'll see how well things work today. Maybe naked will work for her lol, nothing else seems to.
I hate potty training. I'm no good at it.
Happy Birthday to Me!
lol, no my day was not eventful, well not in the exciting way. My days are always eventful.
Today I worked at bit for HIT on a new project. If you know anything about Zen Cart and one of their Wish List mods I'd love to chat with ya. I have a question that I can't find an answer for as of yet. At least not one that doesn't involved sending the user to an error message page which gives me what I want as well. Go figure right.
I'm only taking one project at a time until I grasp their system. One down. One more to go. I'm also not going too over board until my project manager (or rather who I think is my PM) will be back into the office.
But I went to the doctor about this cough I've been having. I talked with my Mom and she said she thought I had it while I was up there as well. I know I've had it since after we got home. Post nasal drip causing the cough. The doc put me on Z-pac and a pill to help stop the drip.
Ya know what? I didn't feel this bad before taking the med. My chest is slightly tight and I'm about to fall asleep. Yes I was tired before, but now, I am exhausted and having a hard time keeping my eyes open. Lovely!
Testing something
I've changed the way some things work on my journal so I'm just testing to make sure things work.
DDR Disney Groove
Well today Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Grooves came in. I picked it up and I played for a bit with the girls. My knees hurt lol.
I really enjoyed it, not sure the girls do, but they don't quite understand so it's not surprising but they did try and they liked dancing with the characters so that was good.
I hope to play it everyday, I'll be on beginner until my knees don't hurt afterwards and then I'll move up from there. But it got me moving I started to sweat and while it may not be the best exercise in the world it did get me off my butt for an hour or so. That's always good.
I hope to get up early in the morning to take a better look at the game, it's really difficult with the girls here to look at the game fully.
Now I have to go clean up the girls. They got into the only bottle of nail polish I own that I use to wear lol and now it's empty and they are covered in nail polish. Oh well time to pray I have nail polish remover.
Work
It's been a tough week, but it's turning out good. The first of the week saw lots of rain and Shea got rained out so we are out a day and a half of pay. This sucks but there is nothing we can do about it, Shea tried to stay but after a certain point he had no choice in the matter, he had to leave.
Late last night, like 8pm I checked my secondary work email and I found I had been accepted to work with Heritage again. While I'm not sure which application they were accepting, I'm assuming it's the one I sent in yesterday versus the one I sent in more than three weeks ago. But it really doesn't matter I got the freelancing work. My goal is to do at least one project a week if not more. I hope more but we'll see.
My biggest concern now is they aren't taking taxes out and I want to pay taxes on it when I can otherwise the money will get spent. So I need to figure out how I can do this and make sure the government gets their money and I get credit for paying these taxes. Last time I did this I didn't have to worry about it cause I was only working for part of the year - 3 months in 07 and 3 months in 08 before I had to turn off cable. It's 5 months this year and I hope to continue working with them until I either have a full time job or my own clients take off with reliable projects and pay. Since I'm not pushing locally yet as I don't have the time I don't expect that to happen until after both girls are in school. So another 2-3 years before my own business will be viable fully.
Anyway I can feel a bit better about our situation, while it's not alot of money it's more money that we had coming in. It's really sad that everything always comes down to money. Sometimes I wish I'd been born in a simpler times, but then I'd never have met my husband, my mom and dad probably would never have met. That's the thing with meeting outside of your home town. My parents met in Denver, but my Mom was born in New York. Simpler times means she'd probably never have gone to Denver and thus I'd never have been born. But still the sentiment still exists. I can't say that I could stand living that type of life now, after having lived a technologically filled one. If things were to go to pot today and technology stopped working I would find it very difficult to live with out my family. I miss them dearly now but I get to talk to my parents every week and they get to see their grandkids over the web cam. It's nice, with out it we'd not have a whole lot of contact and I would be lost. So while I wish for simpler times, I really don't want it either.
Birthdays
Birthdays aren't that glorious for Shea and I. Yesterday I made Shea a desktop wallpaper of our family with recent pictures of him holding Gabriel and of the girls and my parents and his. It's nice he liked it. And I made him peanut butter cookies - his favorite.
I won't do anything for mine but we'll see what Shea does. I did however by Disney Grooves Dance Dance Revolution with the money I got for my birthday. We have our Wii and we hardly use it. Mostly because I can't sit with the girls in here and play it with out them messing the controllers up and the like. But this, I think we can mange to deal well with. My mom made some princess mats for them like the Wii controller for DDR, so that'll give them a mat they can play with with me. I also have a candy dispenser for each of them that looks like the Wii remote, so we are good to go there too. Hopefully the girls will enjoy it as much as I do. And maybe we'll even let them play for real lol. But I don't think they'd understand the idea just yet other than jumping around on the mat. But here's to hoping. It should be fun and I should get exercise while playing while entertaining the girls. It will arrive around the 31st, they didn't have any in stock at Walmart so site to store it is.
Where oh where did the water go?
While we were on vacation we had a problem, a problem we didn't know about. The guest bedroom's bathroom, where Kathleen likes to go potty or use to rather, was used before we left. I thought I had checked it before we left, but I was wrong, it ran from July 1 to July 20ish when we got home. It resulted in a 400 dollar water bill for a time where we should have no water consumption at all.
We bought the parts to fix the toilet and have had the bill adjusted to 200 dollars. While not what we usually do it's better than 400. I can deal with 200 in a month versus 400, that is not a possibility. I thank the technician for telling us that we could adjust the bill because the lady in accounting sure didn't tell me. But today when I went in to take care of they told me I could call and have the bill adjusted for next month's bill as it was running for about 2 weeks during that time. So that'll hopefully take care of any discrepancies there.
Shea was surprised that it wasted that much water. The tech said that he'd seen it happen where it had someone an 800 dollar bill. I can't imagine that. I'm thankful we didn't have that kinda bill.
What do you do?
I try not to worry, particularly about things I can't do anything about. But if I don't think about it I can't try to fix it.
What do you do when you are stressed out?
I need to find a way to stop worrying about things. I can only do so much and right now I'm doing that, so why do I wake up every morning sick to my stomach. I try not to worry about it but ya know how that goes.
I need a way to relax, to destress, to remove the ick from my stomach. Something to ease my the ick of stress. I'm doing all that I can physically to deal with the problem, it's mental help I need I guess.
Something, Something Something...
AC is shot
It sucks two nights ago the AC ran all night set at 72 and it never got cool. So yesterday we turned it off to let it thaw out and cleaned the filters and when we turned it on about 5ish it didn't cool. I'd been okay up to that point, but the girls were getting cranky and I was too. I took a cold shower and I never take cold showers. Kathleen joined me and Samantha played a little bit but didn't get too wet, but more than I had expected.
At 7ish, we drove up to Hurley to the inlaws to get three window units. We'd used these after Katrina and had just a few months back taken them up to there for storage. Shea's dad met us about 3/4s of the way up with them and we drove home, installed the units. We have two in our room and one in Samantha's (which will end up being both of the girls room again here soon.)
At first the one in Sam's room wasn't cooling it wasn't set right but at that time I had already started blowing up the air matress and the girls were set to sleep on it. So we let them stay in here with us. I'm not sure if they will sleep in Sam's room alone, Kathleen isn't big on the door being shut and it'll have to be so we don't kill the electric bill.
So today the big AC is off, and we'll be spending all day in our room. Thankfully the room is nice and big and we can all be comfortable. I've got most of my stuff to work on for one of my clients set up on my laptop. It'll be a bit difficult to do but it beats sitting at my desk in the heat.
I'll be calling the AC guy today to get a price estimate on 2-3 pounds of freon and we hope that'll get us through the rest of the summer. Hopefully by the end of the week we'll have our AC back and things will get back to normal. But if I can stay cool but stay in one room most of the time I can manage it, we've done worse and I can move the PCs into the bedroom. We've plenty of room. We already have our queen bed, one small desk, a dresser drawer system with the TV on it, two smaller dressers with the girls clothes in it, and the queen blow up matress and still enough room to walk and pile clothes etc up in the corner lol. One more desk won't take up any more room, we'll just have to rearrange some of the "piles" to get it in here, but that won't be an issue if we have to do it.
We will probably have to replace the AC in whole next summer so we pray that we'll be able to save money to do so. Wish us luck cause we don't currently have that kind of money to save up.
On a side note, it was much cooler outside last night than it was in the house, so we spent a hour or so cleaning up the back porch and if it is not to hot out today I'll take the girls out on the porch to do some swimming. Unfortunately there will be no swinging or anything out in the grass. It's not been dry enough to mow so the lawn is too high and the moment you step out into the grass you get eaten alive by whatever little bugs like to live in tall grass. But the pool will be more than enough for Kathleen and if it's too warm Samantha as well.
While we were cleaning, one of the share was sporting a very dangerous friend. We were cleaning it off with the hose to get all the dirt and cob webs off, and as Shea set it down there was a huge spider on it. As we were in the process of getting it off to squish it we both noticed that it was a black widow. I was more concerned at that time to kill it before it got near the kids to realize that I'd just moved the chair and was paranoid the rest of the evening while cleaning and moving things around. I do not like spiders and I most definitely am afraid of black widows, I'm just glad it's dead and hopefully didn't lay any eggs. What's funny is that Rae and I were discussing spiders and I had mentioned that I was pretty sure I could identify one (black widow), and yep I sure enough did. I am very thankful that I was tired enough last night that I didn't have nightmares about them.