Craziness or Insanity... you decide.

WARNING: You may not want to read this entry... it is full of complaining and whining, so read at your own risk!

So, I know I promised to do a better job updating the blog once I moved here to Greenville, but life has been kind of crazy. Let's see, what have we been up to for the last couple of months?

1. I guess the most difficult thing for me is my own crazy bad luck. You may know I broke my foot while still in Arizona, and was on crutches for a couple of months and a boot for a few. At the same time I also sprained the ankle on the unbroken foot, so I had a ankle brace and a lot of pain on that foot. I was a sight to behold, and all the time playing "single mom" while Geoff was here in Mississippi working and I was in Arizona for 2-1/2 months with the kids. Oh yeah, and we were trying to move. Well, since we have been here it has been getting worse.... my luck, that is. I took off the boot on the left foot because it had been a few months and the doctor told me I only had to wear it until the middle of April. Well, as soon as I took it off I started getting this horrible pain in my left hip. I have scoliosis and my right hip is a little higher than my left, and I think wearing this boot I threw my body out of whack. I swore something was really wrong with me, but the pain is doing a little better in my hip now than it was about a month ago. On the other hand, my foot is still broken. When I tried to wear the boot again it made my hip pain worse. And to make it worse, I have had a second sprain on my right ankle and I am now having extreme pain on that foot. Also, I have had issues with my shoulders... both of them. Especially my left shoulder that I caught myself with one of the times I was falling. See, with my body all out of whack, and both of my feet hurting, I am just all over the place with my balance. I fell a few days ago and ever since I haven't been able to raise my left arm even enough to place something in my mouth. So.... I am a whiner. And this is not the way I anticipated this blog entry going. Don't I have anything better to blog about?

2. OK, I guess I don't. We have had CRAZY weather since we have been here. Have you heard about it on the news? Tornadoes everywhere. Luckily we haven't had a lot of damage around here, but so many people in other towns in our state have been severely affected by them. So many people have died in these tornadoes this year. It is the deadliest tornado season in US history. The season for tornadoes is not over, and we are just praying that they will stay away from this area (and others, for that matter). I have to admit, I am not sure why people want to live where they are supposed to wake up to sirens that go off in the middle of the night and run for shelter. They say a huge problem with tornado warnings is that nobody takes them seriously once they get used to them. It is hard to, when you are so tired and the sirens go off so often. I have to admit, that the first time they went off here at our house, Geoff and I didn't get the kids up and run for shelter. I checked the internet at that time to see where the tornadoes were and the magnitude of them, and then the spirit told me that things would be OK. After these last tornadoes, though, I am afraid I will be a little more worrisome.

3. Oh, another little issue we have been dealing with here in Mississippi is the idea of the "500 year flood" that is knocking on our door. They used to call it the 100 year flood, and refer often to a horrible flood that happened in the 1920's here and caused a lot of damage to most homes. Well, experts have renamed it because of the fact that the water levels are supposed to be higher than they have ever had before. What this means for us (living only a mile or so from the Mississippi river) is the possibility of some major damage. They are already flooding on the other side of the river from us in Lake Village, Arkansas, because they are a little lower in altitude than we are here. It is anticipated that the levee that holds the water back will reach the "overflowing" which could possible cause it to break by sometime this week. We have all been warned to prepare for the worst and then just pray for the best. We are supposed to have an evacuation plan and a place to go once we are evacuated. They have already evacuated north of town about 10 minutes and those people are mostly in the hotels in Greenville. It looks like we will have to have a place to stay OUT of town most likely. I have a lot of work to do this week (tomorrow) to get ready for it. We need to have everything up off of the floor and in a high place (quite difficult when we still aren't entirely moved in, and have boxes of things both in the house and the garage that we haven't been able to get to... see, I have a broken foot! And especially hard to lift things to high places when I can't lift my arm.) Geoff is going to help me get ready for this... which brings me to my next thing.

4. Geoff is working SO many hours! I don't know if you know this, but Geoff was asked to be the pharmacy manager in his store. He is "cleaning up the mess" that he inherited with the job, and feeling a little more than overwhelmed by it all. Now, in the pharmacy THEY have to prepare for the flood, too. So, needless to say, Geoff is working like a dog at the pharmacy (pretty much 7 days a week) and wishing he didn't accept this position as manager. I am sure he will get the hang of it all really soon and that things will get easier, but for now, it is a lot of stress on him!

5. OK, this is the last complaint I have for the moment. I have had the intentions of home schooling my kids while here in Greenville, but once we got here I realized I needed a little time to figure out a plan... after all, our computer died over a year and a half ago and we I haven't really had a lot of access to one since (until this week... yeah!). I planned on getting here and "winging" it for the first little while, while I found a great program on line. Then Geoff's laptop that he had for pharmacy school died. I mean died. So, that kind of ruined the plan. The first couple of weeks went by and I hadn't really done any school with the kids, and realizing my situation, it was really hard to try to do it at the time. I finally decided that I would put the kids in the public school here (after all that would give us a chance to see how it was for just a couple of months, and then if we really liked it, maybe it would be OK for next year after all). Well, we don't like it. That is all I can say. I have 2 crying kids every single morning and 2 crying kids every day after school as well. I didn't know there were schools still so old fashioned allowed in the U.S. I mean, they still whip the kids or paddle them for bad behavior. They put rulers to their hands on a regular basis. They don't allow you to sit anywhere but in your assigned seating at lunch (not by a friend, heaven forbid) and you are only allowed to take bathroom breaks when you first get there in the morning, and at lunch. You get in trouble for asking at any other time. You get in trouble if you step outside of a certain square when you are walking to and from class. If you do get your color card changed (from green to yellow and yellow to red) it stays on that color until you do something EXTRA special and get your teacher to acknowledge it and then hope she is in a good mood enough to turn it back to a better color. If she doesn't do it, the color card just stays on that same color day after day, week after week... unless, of course, you are bad and the color goes down. Natalie has had a problem with a lot of allergies since we have been here (actually, so has Jackson) but she has been complaining of her ears feeling "full" and having a hard time hearing. Natalie's color card got changed all the way to red because she didn't hear her teacher one time when she was calling her name. For a week and a half she had to walk the perimeter of the basketball courts the entire time everyone had recess because her color card was on "red". And, they only have one recess a day... which is hard enough. OK... if you can't tell, I am really disgusted with the school, but feel now that it can't really take them out, especially when I don't have a plan still for home school. I am planning on home schooling all three kids starting this fall (that's right, Staci will be in kindergarten), so wish me luck! I am hoping I can figure this all out!

So, now that I have rambled on like a maniac, is there any doubt why I am crazy!?

Sorry for the negative post.... I just had to write this all down more as a journal so I can remember all that we have been through lately!!