Hard to believe it’s Friday already.  This week sure sped by, didn’t it?   So. Grandma’s feeling a bit better, though not at all happy about going into assisted living, no matter how temporarily.  The silver lining to this whole thing is that she realizes that this might involve some money on her part, and so is cutting off my blood-sucking vampire of a cousin, who has been milking her and my Great Aunt dry for years.  Lining your pockets at the expense of old women on a severely limited income is tantamount to elder abuse in some circles, so this cutting off is very much welcomed by our entire family. …

Sorry for the little hiatus there.  My Grandma fell on Monday and broke her leg.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal, and it probably wouldn’t be in someone young.  But she’s 86, and her bones are so brittle, the doctor described them as eggshells.  He also described some of the risks of surgery on someone of her age, which scared us all a bit, and had my grandma making lists of what piece of jewelry she wants to go to go to which granddaughter, if she should die. Tuesday, she had surgery.  They put in a titanium plate, so she’s got titanium from hip to knee.  The surgeon said it…

(money photo found at Gourmet Gal) The first few weeks that I was out of work, I didn’t really change my spending habits much.  I had my final paycheck, complete with over 100 hours of PTO.  I had my severance, puny though it was.  I won’t say I was in total denial, but I was in partial denial.  I bought some clothes, thinking that I will need them when I start working.  Having worked from home for several years has put me in a bad situation in that department.  I stopped at the grocery store whenever we needed anything, and as often as not, I ended up leaving with a…

I keep hearing about people who are underwater on their loans, and who might walk away from their homes in order to save money.   I just read this on Yahoo, where four people who are underwater discussed their decisions to stay or not stay in their homes.  It seems a bit disingenuous to me, becuase of the four people they interviewed, they found two who would not walk away from their homes, and two who are considering it, but they didn’t interview anyone who is definitely planning it.  There must be some folks out there who are walking away from their mortgages, so why didn’t they get some of them?…

(front row: Liz, Tracy, and Cherry; back row, me and Dorothy) One upside of blogging is the wonderful people that you meet, and how they can go from being just comments on your blog to being people that you genuinely care about, and sometimes, people that you get to meet in person.  Cherry, Liz, Dot, and I were friends before we started blogging.  We used to work together in a previous life, and happily, we’ve stayed friends all these years later. We’ve made friends with Tracy and Gina through blogging, and we’ve been fortunate enough to meet them in person.  Cherry and I went to Tracy’s wedding shower, and Cherry…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glNjsOHiBYs[/youtube] Happy Birthday to a wonderful Sister-In-Law, La Luna!  I hope all your birthday wishes come true. (The recording is from when the Beatles were on a BBC show called “Saturday Club”, which is who they’re singing Happy Birthday to.  In case you’re trying to figure that one out.)

(Alfred, found here) I’ve been unemployed for 3 weeks now, and people keep asking me how I’m doing…am I worried, am I stressed, am I OK?  I’ve gotta say, thus far, I’m fine.  I’m sleeping well, feeling fairly relaxed during the day, doing OK.  I don’t have as much time for reading/blogging/watching TV/going to movies as I expected to have, but I guess that’s fine.  I run a lot of errands, I volunteered at Maya’s school yesterday, I take walks or bike rides in the middle of the day.  I look for work, but there isn’t much out there right now.  I have a few job leads, which will hopefully…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs[/youtube] This cracks me up, and if it only mentioned all of the memes on Facebook right now, it would be perfect.  🙂  Happy Saturday!

This week was the first in which, for at least part of the week, I was home while Ted was at work and Maya was at school.  I don’t think this has ever happened to me before, when I wasn’t working.  It seems like it should be similar to while I was working, but nope, it isn’t.  At least not yet.  The biggest difference is the freedom that I feel.  On Wednesday, instead of working, I cleaned, I went to the grocery store, I took out the recycling, I gathered our tax information together, and I went to a movie.  I really enjoyed the whole day.  And when I picked…

And probably a Silkwood Shower, if you know what I mean.   They’re working to stop raw and partially treated sewage from spewing into the San Francisco Bay.  Way too gross.  I cannot even imagine what a nasty, disgusting job that was.  And they said the fix was temporary, so I don’t know if someone is going to have to go down into the filthy water again or not.  Blech. How do you think they decided which one has to get his mouth and face down near that filth?  Short straw?  Flip a coin?  RoShamBo?

I remember the exact day that I received my first bicycle, a hand me down from my older brother.  The training wheels were long since lost, which didn’t stop me from wanting to learn to ride it.  I would practice every day in the courtyard of the church next door to our house.  Eventually I did learn to ride, but not without many scrapes and bruises, the worst of which was when my finger was smashed between the handle bars and a railing in the courtyard.  My mom iced it and that was it, until the next morning I woke up with it swollen like a sausage, and it had…