Oh my, I have a lot to say...

It's been awhile since I've posted and a lot has been happening around here. I broke my left pointer finger about a month ago, a fracture of the distal phalanx I believe. It's uncomfirmed due to my not wanting to pay for a doctor visit and xray when the only thing that would be done is a splint. I just picked one up at Walgreens and put it on myself. It should have been healed by now, but stupidly... I'd take the splint off each morning to shower and would test my finger by bending it. Common sense should tell me that bending it while trying to heal it wouldn't work. Common sense wasn't hanging around for the first three weeks, so I'm still in the splint. I'm getting much better at typing without using that finger.

My mom was to visit my little sister in Washington the middle of last month. She mentioned she was having some pressure in her chest to her doctor at a regular check up before the trip. Her doctor told her to skip the trip and get her heart checked out by a cardiologist. Good advice it turns out, she had one artery 100% blocked (the one nicknamed "The Widowmaker"), another was 80% blocked. As she was meeting with the cardiac surgeon to plan for double bypass surgery, it seemed she started having a heart attack there in the doctor's office. She was transported a block from the Watson Clinic offices to the hospital by ambulance and gave us all the fright of our lives. I had to call my sisters to share the news, one lives near Seattle, another near Atlanta and the other in Japan. I know it could have been worse, but those were very hard calls to make. She had the bypass surgery the next morning. It turns out she didn't have a heart attack, as there was no damage to the heart muscle. She likely had an anxiety attack which can mimic a heart attack. Her surgery went perfectly and she was home 5 days later. She's chafing at the diabetic/low cholesterol/low sodium diet, but is doing very well otherwise. She'd had no symptoms other than some slight chest pressure as warning. She was very, very lucky.

My body decided to celebrate my mom's homecoming with a mild but still very painful outbreak of shingles. Lovely. Stress doesn't make me cry (usually) or yell (hardly ever), it gives me headaches and deep nerve pain. The rash is gone and the pain is starting to fade. It's a very unpleasant feeling to put it mildly. Feels like getting stabbed with hot knitting needles at the rash location and then as the rash fades it feels more like having a hot iron pushed against the skin. At least the pain is localized so I can identify the issue quickly. I'm getting used to it. This is at least my fifth outbreak in as many years.

The girls are all still doing very well in their classes. Tori just signed up to dual enroll in an Intermediate Algebra class at PSC and is chugging along through American History and World History. Beth is almost finished with Language Arts 3 and Algebra I, and will soon start Earth Space Science and Geometry. Lili and Evie still have awhile to go in their FLVS classes. All of the girls continue to do their homeschool assignments daily until late August when we will switch back to 3 days a week.

I've been enjoying the frequent rains as it will help keep the a/c bill lower, but it creates a jungle effect in the yard. Everything is a beautiful shade of green. I was out with the dogs yesterday, trying to get them to do their thing. They didn't want to walk through the tall wet grass. I checked out the turtle pond in our screened porch while I stayed dry. We have another infestation of black widow spiders. This time they brought along their cousins, the brown widows. Great. We'll be emptying the screen room and dismantling the pond while we deal with them. It's pretty disgusting and dangerous too. Black widows will defend their webs, so they are likely to bite, they are venomous as I think everyone knows. The brown widows are meeker and will not defend their webs, but if they do bite, the venom is much more toxic.

I installed a webcam on my computer yesterday and was able to talk with my sister in Japan via Skype. It's free and we can see each other. How great is that! We can only talk for brief periods as they are 13 hours ahead. We'll have to make a chart of the hours that will work so the kids can call their cousins whenever they like without anyone being woken in the middle of the night.

That's the past month in a nutshell. Back to laundry and grocery list making.