Life going on..

Apparently, I've been very busy the past five days. Too busy to blog anything. Very busy indeed. Doing what? Ummm, I'm fairly sure I've made my bed a few times. I might have emptied the dishwasher once. There was coffee, walks, buying a fish...well, I'm sure there's more I accomplished. I just don't remember everything. I did manage to empty three more boxes and locate the bolts for Master J's bunk bed so I can sell it. That was a huge thing. I was starting to think I had lost those bolts and was going to have to go through all the packing paper that I had boxed up to find them. Turns out I'm just an idiot (again) and had set the bolts on top of a box. Which I then put another box on top of. I did search through the boxes but when I went to look through the bottom box, I lifted the top box and the lid to the bottom box at the same time. So I didn't see the bolts on the lid of the bottom box. Today I took the time to remove the top box and there they were. I also sold my moving boxes today as well. Half of them got picked up a few minutes ago and the other half will get picked up tomorrow when the guy's brother can lend him a pick up truck. I'm trying to get a few more things out there yet today so I can clear out some room and bring in some cash. My hope is that I can earn enough money to buy myself a bookshelf. Turns out that it's hard to get decent ones for not a lot of money. I've been searching. Anything under $150 is either made of press board or pre-dates the Hair bands of the 90s. All I want is a very specific size, solid wood bookshelf that will not look out of place in the same area as my dining room set. You'd think I was looking for a left kidney made out of gold. Ah well, I'll keep selling stuff until the amount of money I have matches the amount of money I need to get what I want.
In other news, I mentioned above how I bought a fish. Since I went to cichlids in my big tank, there was no way to put a betta in there. Since I've had a betta (or 2, or 75) for the last eight years, I just figured I'd get one and put it in it's own tank. So I went shopping and found a giant betta. These guys are pretty recent to the wholesale market (they've been available from breeders for a few years now). Anyway, I found a cool one and he's now sitting on the table. And guess who's sitting next to him to keep him company?

Yeah, she's very helpful that way!

I also finally spoke with a friend of mine that I've known for about 17 years. Turns out I should have called sooner, that way I could have gotten the bad news a little bit at a time instead of all at once.

First, her husband lost his job and is struggling to find a new one in this down market.

Second, they had to put her dog to sleep because he had gotten so sick recently.

And third, her thyroid cancer is back. She already had the surgery to remove the nodules on Halloween. Unfortunately that was the easy part. The hard part is coming up in January. It seems that in order for the radiation treatment to work, she has to go off her thyroid medication for at least a week. This gets all of the medicine out of her system and allows the radiation to work. But this is a miserable task. When she went through this before, all of her friends signed on to help out on different days just to try and help her though. We would bring her food and make her eat at least a little. We would take her for a walk as far as she could go (maybe a quarter mile, round trip, on a good day) just to get her moving. We would sit with her and talk and listen and know that whatever we had going on in our lives was nothing compared to what she was going through. Your thyroid affects so much that we don't even think about. When you get totally depleted like she's going to have to do, you aren't hungry but you want to eat. You're restless and exhausted but you don't have energy to move and you can't sleep either. You just float along and everything you should do, you can't. And it is miserable. And I wouldn't wish it on anyone. And this time, I can't even be there physically to help her out because I'm 1500 miles away. So I'll do the only thing I can do, I'll ask the God of my understanding to take care of her. And I'll send her cards while she's going through it that she won't appreciate until after she's gone through it and recovered. I'll call her and most likely talk with her husband about how she's doing. And I'll pray some more. Because that's what she'd do for me.