Life right now

So here we are, in the middle of October already.

So much is going on around here!!  We did make it to the beach late last month for four absolutely glorious days to celebrate our 30th "gotcha" anniversary.  Sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago that I met Larry and started that long journey with him, sometimes it feels like it was just ten or so years ago and then sometimes it feels like that life never happened.  But it did.  And we have the memories (and the ongoing nightmares!) to prove it.  God has blessed us beyond anything we could have imagined and we are so grateful for every single blessing.  Every. One.

We go Monday to my foot doctor over in Columbus to discuss surgery on my left ankle.  I'm finally having complete ankle reconstruction, ligament reconstruction and he's going to see what can be done with my sural sensory nerve, the one that's causing me so much pain.  I've have horrible nerve pain in my foot since December 2016 and once I got to the Hughston Clinic, they got to the bottom of it.  They did a nerve study in August and discovered that my sural nerve was not responsive.  It's either severed or trapped.  My foot feels like it's on fire ALL THE TIME.  When we were at the beach, I could not tell if my foot was getting too much sun because it feels sunburned all the time so I made sure to keep it covered in sunblock and sand.  No sunburns on my foot or anywhere else either!  That spray sunblock really works!  So, anyway, I'll have surgery on my foot, finally, after six long painful years, and hopefully, I can get back to some sort of normal life.  We postponed our mountain trip until spring, so I can HIKE!

Hurricane Michael came through here this week via the Florida Panhandle and we got a night of crazy wind and much needed rain.  We never lost power and I sat up until 4:00 am watching our beloved weather guy in Macon do his thang and keep us all safe.  The yard and porches were a mess but thankfully, I was off the next day to get everything all tidied up.

One of our little wild outside kitties that we feed (Fiona, who is no more than six months old!) gave birth to a stillborn baby and left it on the porch right where I would find it, under the bench on the rug that I put out there for them to nap on.  Poor little thing.  No bigger than a mouse.  Broke my heart.  Larry buried him today out in a flower bed.  And made a cross for him with his name, Mike, since he was born during the hurricane.  Nature is so sad sometimes.

We went to see "A Star Is Born" Monday and LOVEDED it!!!  What an amazing movie.  If you haven't seen it, GO!  Take tissue.  Like a whole box.  Seriously, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper were phenomenal in this movie.  Their acting, their musical performances, they even wrote most of the songs themselves.  I didn't even know BC could sing.  He sho' can.  

We're looking forward to the end of the year, the holidays, my recovery and that blue wave that's coming next month!  Lord, hear our prayer.  

Pack rat or hoarder? You make the call.

I admit it, openly and with some shame.  I am a beauty hoarder.  So today, I set out to clear some space and just share my stash with somebody else.  I hope the girls at work want this stuff!

I subscribe to two beauty boxes each month, Birchbox and Ipsy.  Every month, for $10, they send me five beauty samples.  Makeup, skin care, hair care, fragrance.  And I LOVE IT!!  I love getting those packages in the mail.  I look forward to getting those packages in the mail.  

But ten samples every month tend to pile up!  I can't use them all.  Last month, I gave a bag of them to the girl who cleans our house but still, they are stressing me out.  Seriously.  Stress.  Because really, I don't just hoard beauty products.  I hoard vintage sheets, towels (we have 59 towels in this house!  For just two people.  Good grief.), just things we've picked up here and there at estate sales.  I have drawers in a dresser that I'm filling and there are boxes and boxes of stuff in the attic with things to sell in my booth at an antique store here in town but that's another blog post.  Later.  

But today!  Today I cleaned out the beauty stuff!  I am so proud of myself.  I feel so freeeeee!  

This is before.  Very sad and stressful.  I hated to even open this drawer.

And this is after!  I only kept the things I USE.  I had 19 bottles of nail polish.  I kept my five favorite colors.  That's it.  

There are bags and bags of things that I'll just give away.  

I am inspired to tackle every drawer and cabinet in this house!  Woo hoooo!!

Wow. September.

This summer has just flown by!  With Larry's three eye surgeries and our trips to a new foot doctor and a new dentist (because I need six new crowns of course I do), we have had a crazy couple of months.  

Last month, I was moved to another office at work to be the admin for one of our flights and I bought a new Jeep!  Well, a new-to-me Jeep.  Turns out I had some retirement left unclaimed at Citigroup so I hurriedly claimed it and bought a right-off-the-lease Jeep.  It's my very first ever SUV and I love it!  It's also the first ever car I was able to pay cash for.  That was a great feeling!  It's white and I named her Pearl.  

Gardening this summer was a flop.  It's September 1st and we just now today ate an atomic grape tomato.  A tomato.  One.  There are a couple more on the vine but the peppers didn't do a thing and the sunflowers kinda disappointed me, too.  I pulled up the last of them today.  Oh well, there's always next year!

We'll be beach bums toward the end of the month and I am so looking forward to that.  And then a trip to the mountains in November.  

And then Christmas!  Good Lord, time, slow down.

Monkey Farts??

You know those ads that pop up in your social media feeds?  Well, this one popped up in my Instagram feed.

They had me at whipped soap.  I’m such a sucker for soaps and shampoos, really any kind of beauty stuff.  I get an Ipsy bag and a Birchbox every month.  I get so excited when I see them in the mailbox!

This whipped soap, by Glory Cloud USA and called Monkey Farts, grabbed my attention, not just because I’m a sucker for soap but because it’s whipped!  And Monkey Farts??!  I had to try it.

So I ordered it and it came in a few days.  The jar was smaller than I expected (4 oz) but it was slap full of soap! It says facial soap on the label but you can use it for anything.  You only need a little bit and it lathers and lathers!!  And the scent is just heavenly!!  Exactly what you would expect a monkey fart to smell like...ripe bananas, juicy pineapple, sweet apples and creamy vanilla. Okay, well, in this alternate soap beauty world maybe.  Ha! 

I’ve used it for four days, just on my face, and I absolutely love it.  It leaves my face so soft and clean and smelling fruity!  

My summer girls

I've grown sunflowers along the backyard fence every summer that we've lived here.  This year, though, I was worried about them because we had such a cold, rainy March and that's when we planted them AND replanted them because squirrels dug them up, in spite of the Texas Pete!  

We planted more seeds with netting over them and that did the trick.  But it was almost April before they even sprouted!  (And we still don't have tomatoes or peppers.  Big bushy healthy plants.  NO maters.  NO peppers.)  

I had almost given up on them and then, all of a sudden, they just started busting out!

And they're just beautiful.

This one is the first to grow taller than the fence!  Ain't she a beaut??

Happy Birthday to me!

Your homegirl is 51 today.  Another year on this old planet.  A fun year, a sad year, an unbelievably stressful year.  Things don't always go the way you want them to or even the way that they should go but somehow, you have to keep on keepin' on, keep getting up to welcome the sun every morning, keep reminding yourself that even the bad is not that bad.

Larry made my birthday super special, with our trip today up to Senoia, to get up close and personal with our favorite TV show, The Walking Dead.  We had such a fun day.

This morning, he woke me up with this vintage Pyrex Happy Birthday mug, that I'd never even seen in the wild, only online.  It debuted in 1967, just like me!  I love it!!  

And he had waiting for me this delicious chocolate ganache cake and cards from him and our boys.

Yesterday, I opened this gift from him.  A vintage Pyrex promotional casserole dish in Blue Willow!  Another treasure I have never seen in the wild.  Well, I did see it once, in about a zillion pieces in the bottom of a box my sweet friend, Brandy, sent me.  It didn't make the trip from Virginia.  Dang US mail!  But the lid did and until she reminded me, I'd forgotten all about it! 

51 feels pretty good already.  Now if I could just STOP worrying about things I have no control over, 52 might be even better.

My Walking Dead Birthday!

All I wanted to do this year for my birthday was to go to Senoia to Walking Dead country and eat at Nic & Norman's (owned by director, producer and special effects creator, Greg Nicotero and actor and TWD's Daryl Dixon, Norman Reedus) and do some shopping and sightseeing.  We left this morning, took our time driving up and got to the restaurant at 11:00, right when they opened.  We ordered soup and salad and burgers and then some lobster mac and cheese to take with us when we left.  

I got the Greg's Pick, a blue cheese burger with a salad and Larry got the bison burger with their house sidewinder fries.  

Everything was delicious!  I loved the décor and atmosphere of the restaurant and the music and the service were great, too!  We were the first ones there but it soon filled up.

Our waitress brought me a red velvet Cutie Pies & Cakery (they don't have a website or I'd link it here) cake in the cutest little Mason jar for my birthday.  It was sooooo good.  

We waddled out of there in the heat and man, it was HOTTT, and walked down the sidewalk, popping in at a few shops here and there to cool off.  The Walking Dead gift shop was a block away. 

This. Picture.  I didn't even notice this guy photobombing my picture of Rick's cutout wearing a Terminus BBQ apron (bwahahaha!) until we were on our way home.  HILARIOUS!!

We went downstairs to the museum and got to meet famous Abraham lookalike, Chris Twellman, "German Abe"!  He was super, super nice and talked to us a long time.  He even took our picture in the jail cell!

I like this picture the best of the three German Abe took because you can see Glenn's little bitty self (another cutout) just over Larry's shoulder.  Sigh.  Glenn.

But sadly, everything couldn't be perfect about today.  I got a little too close to a walker and got bit!

Owwww!!!  All these years watching TWD and I let one of them suckers BITE ME.  Naaaaah, not really, there was a makeup artist there and she did this with makeup and latex.  Great job, huh??  So great that German Abe asked me if I'd been bitten by a Brown Recluse.  Ha!  I swear, I was sitting there watching her do it and the dang thing started to HURT.  What the what??  Your brain can do some crazy things to you.

We left town and drove to THE WALL AROUND ALEXANDRIA!!  I was SOOOOO excited to see it!!  And this pic here??  I was peeking in between the cracks and I could see Alexandria in there!!  The best part of this day.  Hand's down.  Or up!  Ha!

Here's Larry pretending to try to get the gate open.  So funny!

Shut yo' mouf.  That's the wall!!!

And this is something we haven't seen!  The windmill, which means they have time jumped and they have begun "a key to a future" from Georgie's book.  

Oh, we had such a blast in Senoia!!  Just a couple of crazy fans seeing where it all happens.  Couldn't have asked for a better birthday.