Moved

I've moved. If you happen to run across my little world here and want to find more, you can find me at The Adventures of April.

I might be back soon.

I've been missing blogging lately. Since it's been over two years since I've posted anything on here, and I'm sure there are millions of people just dying to hear from me again, I might just revamp my blog and take it up again.

We'll see.

Bits and pieces

Life has been nuts. I could right an insanely long blog about all that is going on... but instead I'll just write a fairly long blog about some of the things that are going on.

~ Remember awhile back when I mentioned that our sewer was broken and we were going to have to replace it… and I really hoped that it wouldn’t turn into one of those horrible, horrible long ordeals that took months to finish? Yeah… this is my bathroom right now:

Notice the hole in the ground and the distinct lack of any type of plumbing and/or sewage pipes in said hole? Yep, that’s right… Still not done. Although, we’ve upgraded slightly from India-like conditions in the other bathroom and have an shower-like thing installed… and we no longer have to flush with a bucket. Good times.

~ We got a new supervisor at work three weeks ago. She is… well, she is not going to be my best buddy. Or probably my buddy at all. I'm, in fact, pretty sure she hates my guts. Yet another reason to find a new job.

~ I’m having sinus surgery next Wednesday (29 October). They’re going to remove the polyps and straighten my septum so I can breathe better. The ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) doctor was showing my the CT scan of my nose... one side of my nose, there's just a tiny passageway for the air to get through, the other side is full of polyps. No wonder I've had so many sinus problems... It’s supposed to be pretty miserable for the first week after the surgery, but then, if all goes as planned, it will make my life much nicer.

~ I saw the craziest wreck the other night. It looked like a big grain truck had pulled out in front of a pickup truck and a PT cruiser. The grain truck ended up blocking the westbound lanes somehow (it was on a divided highway) and the pickup and PT cruiser apparently both hit their brakes to avoid hitting the grain truck. The PT cruiser went UNDER the pickup. The pickup was on it’s front two wheels, and the cab of the PT cruiser was almost directly underneath the cab of the pickup… and other than a crack in the windshield and some hood damage, the PT cruise was just fine. Everyone was standing around outside the cars and it didn’t look like anyone got hurt, but it was pretty odd looking.

~ It’s now time for an “April is an idiot” story. Elly the dog isn’t supposed to go into our bedroom because she sheds a lot and my husband wants to have at least one room that isn’t covered with dog hair. Lately we’ve been blocking the door to the room with a box fan that is about 2 feet high. Because our house is... unique... the frame for the bedroom door is really low - if I stand up straight in the doorway, I can touch the door with the top of my head. So… the other night, I was playing with Elly the dog. We'd been playing the game for awhile and I thought I’d outsmart her by jumping into the bedroom and hiding behind the door. So I ran to the door and leaped over the fan… and apparently, I didn’t duck far enough. I smashed my head against the top of the door, and down I went. My husband said he heard a crash and asked me what happened, and I didn’t answer, so I guess I knocked myself out for a minute. I got a nice size lump on my head, a bunch of bruises, and a really bent up fan.

The aforementioned Elly the dog and the fan.

Elly the dog is gigantic now. My husband calls her dogzilla. My mom calls her Elly-phant.

~ I’m taking three classes this semester. None of them are terribly difficult, but they are starting to kick my butt.

~ It's almost November... which means it's again time for NaNoWriMo. I'm pretty excited again this year. I've got what I hope is a pretty good story I've been mulling over.

~ Speaking of November, I'll be 30 at the end of November. That's a little weird.

OK. That's enough for now. I'll write again sometime in the near future. I hope.

Another "haven't fallen off the planet" post...

Okay, serious, where is time going?

There is no way, absolutely no way, that it can already be the middle of September. I'm starting to think that everytime I blink, a week goes by...

Did you ever notice that whenever you decide that enough is enough and you are going to change *insert messed up area of your life here*, then everything falls apart. Not only does area you were going to change go straight down the tube, everything else seems to decide to dive right on in after it.

Take, for example, my decision to stop being a chicken and to do this whole writing thing. That was last summer. The year that has followed has been one of the most insane years of my life thus far... And now I sit here realizing that I'm in almost exactly the same place as I was last year in regards to writing... except this year, large pieces of my life that were going pretty swell last year are now laying crumbled on the ground all around me.

I've been doing a lot of soul searching the last few days. I'm not really sure what's going on with my life right now. I've been reading the Martyr Song books by Ted Dekker, and they've... let's just put it mildly and say that they've really shaken me up... and made me wondering if this is all just God trying to get my attention... because to be honest, I haven't been listening very well lately. Or at all.

So anyway... I'm still here. Hi.

I hate plumbing...

The house that we live in is... well, it's an interesting sort of place. My husband lived there for while as a child, then his parents rented it out for a number of years, and about 10 years ago, my husband bought it from his parents. It's a concrete block house... actually, it started out as a garage, then was converted into a house in the 1950s. These days, it's not in the greatest shape. One of those kind of places where every time you fix one thing, 3 more things break.

We've had some problems with the sewer line recently. My husband worked on it a couple of weeks ago and thought he'd taken care of most of the problem... Nope.

We had a plumbing disaster yesterday afternoon, the details of which I will not horrify you with. This weekend will most likely be spent replacing our entire sewer line as well as about half the plumbing...

Our last plumbing adventure (which occurred a few months before we got married and I, foolishly, agreed to come over and help with) started out as a "simple" job of replacing of the water heater that would only take a few hours and turned into a not-quite-so-simple job of replacing most of the plumbing and took several months to complete. I really, really, really hope that this doesn't turn into another one of those.

We have a second bathroom at our house (more precisely, a former bathroom) that we (more precisely, my husband) managed to make somewhat usable... Actually, it it quite reminiscent of the facilities we had when I was in India and involves the use of buckets for bathing and flushing...

I think that I want to move.

Bon voyage...

One of my dearest friends, Brooks, and her family leave tonight for a year in Kenya with Africa Inland Mission.

Pray for them if you think of it.

Nope, haven't fallen off the face of the earth...

Once upon a time, there was an April who blogged daily and sometimes had to restrain herself from posting more than once a day.

That April seems to have gone AWOL.

It's been a busy summer. No, actually, that's not quite true. It's just been a weird summer. Instead of making the two people who might actually read this suffer through a horrendously long post, I'll summarize. (The way it will only be a very long post, not horrendously long.)

- Still battling the bizarre health issues... we're going on three and a half months now. The doctors finally decided that I had a bacterial infection (which caused two ear infections, a sinus infection, an upper respiratory infection, and bronchitis), sinus polyps, mono (for the second time), and a virus in my right inner ear that caused some nerve damage. The baterial infection has cleared up. They decided not to do surgery on my sinuses for now, and instead have me using this oh-so-pleasant nose spray twice a day. The nerve damage in my ear has caused a slight hearing loss and some balance issues, although it's not a bad as it could be. 20% nerve damage is considered a problem and I'm only at 15%. I'm supposed to do some physical therapy to help me adjust to the change, that should start up in the next couple weeks. I'm back to working half-days at work almost every day, which means I'm getting a paycheck again (though a small one), which is very nice.

- Work is crazier than ever. The co-worker who never works is still employed (ah, isn't working for the state wonderful?), despite the fact that she works less than before and only shows up for work a few hours a week. Our boss is leaving at the end of the month, which makes her the sixth person from our unit in 2 1/2 years to leave primarily because of issues with the co-worker who never works. Thankfully, we finally got a new person to fill the position that's been vacant since mid-March. He just started last week, but he should be trained by the time school starts in a couple weeks and chaos ensues.

- Elly is gigantic. She's now 8 months old, about 60 pounds... and still growing. She's a funny dog... sometimes I'll just sit and watch her and laugh. Speaking of Elly, there's a new post onthe Elly the Dog Blog.

- Classes starts again in a couple weeks. I'd planned to take a class or two this summer, but I didn't because of all the health garbage. I'm taking three classes this fall, all online. We'll see how that goes... At the rate I'm going, it's going to take me about 4 years to get a 2 year degree. I'll get there some day.

- Our third anniversary is next month. That's hard to believe. Sometimes it seems like we've been married forever, other times it doesn't seem possible that it's already been three years. Our anniversary conveniently falls on a Friday this year, and since I have no vacation time, we're going down to Branson, Missouri for the weekend, since it's only a few hours away. My family used to go down there a lot when I was a kid, but I haven't been there for years. We're going to Silver Dollar City one day, and I'm really excited about that, because I am a dork. I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, I guess that's plenty for now...