An early morning farewell, a door opens, and some tid bits.

Aside from this piece of art being one of my favorites, I thought it was an appropriate image for how I feel at the moment. If one were to turn the Knight into the apartment my girlfriend and I are vacating, the Lady would be myself saying a soft and sweet farewell. Yet somehow I feel as if I could be the Knight riding off to said apartment to battle the task of moving out. However, for us we will not be returning to the happy and relieved arms of our apartment when all is said and done.

For the last week I have been scrambling and packing with a firm, unrelenting and dreaded deadline in fast approach. My back is still giving me much grief, my knees have decided to join the pain parade, and due to the extreme heat here in the mid-west, this moving experience has not been a pleasant one. In fact, I have been so frustrated and so stressed from lack of boxes, lack of time, or this or that, that I have quite literally tossed any sense of organization out the window and am just packing things as I go along in plastic sacks, trash bags, luggage ect... But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We have very little left to pack and just have a little cleaning to do and come Friday afternoon, we'll turn in our keys and say "So long and thanks for all the fish".

My one class this quarter isn't going as well as I had hoped. I just got an update on my grade for the class and nearly cried. After all the work I put into making sure I had my book work done, I have a big, whopping F for the class and that's due to me not being caught up on the labs (which I am still in the process of doing). On top of that we just had a test with a study guide of over 100 questions and I studied and I looked over the study guide before the test and when I got the damned test it was only 15 questions long. Then my instructor went over the test after everyone had it handed in. I am pretty sure I only got 3 questions right. So, since my back was really giving me trouble and I was depressed, I left school during the second break.

However, despite all the negative, harrowing, and depressing things going on in my life right now, I had my first therapy session yesterday. I decided that I was going to see if I could get a therapist through social services program just so I could talk to someone outside my network of people and see if I couldn't get some other ideas on how to cope with stuff yada yada yada. Anyway, her diagnosis of me was that I have severe depression (I already knew that) and I have some social phobias. The session went well, I really like her, and she had some interesting things to say. I go back in two weeks and she said that she would have some things outlined for me to help me better deal with some of the problems I am dealing with. Leaving her office felt like a door opening to something really good. I really felt better.

Fun tidbits, my Dad helped me get the Dragon mask for this year's Dragon festival in Guild Wars. It;s pretty cool and eventually I'll log on and get a screen shot of it. My Mom and I are going to play with some of the gemstones she's been collecting and make some jewelry together and she's excited to show me some new TV series she's been watching. In a week or two we will have a friend from Idaho coming down to visit us, which will be awesome since we haven't seen her in almost two years! We really want to see her sister too, but they don't have anyone to take care of their animals so she's staying behind and will come later this year.

And lastly, I started watching this anime on Hulu while waiting for my Girlfriend to get off work one night last week. So far so good. I've only seen 4 episodes but it's interesting and when I get some more time I am really looking forward to seeing the rest of it.

Down is never a pleasant way to be.

For the last couple of weeks my forced perch has been at the end of my sofa by day and sleeping on the sofa by night. One afternoon I was in Gander Mountain with my girlfriend and her parents who were visiting from out of town and somehow or someway, I managed to throw my back out of sync. For the last couple of years I have had back issues and once even had to have it realigned. Normally I simply have a day or two where it hurts and I rest a little and then I am back to my usual self. However this time it wasn't so simple.

So, I took a trip to the doctor. I was put on pain pills and muscle relaxers but they only help a little. In fact this time the pain has been so debilitating that I couldn't walk, take a shower without assistance much less go to the bathroom alone. Needless to say to be 27 years old and so dependent on others when you take pride in making meals, having a clean house, and helping to take care of others has left me feeling guilty, useless, and such a burden.

Also, because of my back, I have had to drop out of two of my classes at ITT and the Chair of my Department is doing what he can to help me have some success this quarter by keeping me in one class. I have about half of my homework for that class finished but I will need to use all the time I have to finish catching up so that I may be caught up enough (at least book work wise) with the rest of the class. The labs I will have to schedule another time to go in and complete.

This physical hindrance has also had more than a few minor emotional repercussions. I have been worried about school, worried about others (family, friends, my cats), to be frank, I've had some pretty awful panic attacks. Since I haven't been able to do much, I've felt like I have lost a sense of purpose and meaning. I find myself constantly saying 'I'm sorry' and feeling so guilty and even clingy and yet withdrawn. I know a lot of that playing into the fact that I have depression and anxiety. However, when it takes you an hour to clean a small kitchen having to stop every ten minutes because your back is screaming agony, it makes it difficult to be A-okay. I've kind of been an emotional mess.

But there is a little more good news, per se. My girlfriend and I will be moving back in with my parents by July 15 and we will be saving up the money to get a really nice place of our own. One we can paint and really play with designing. It's a town house but one we can paint and make home improvements to.

It's so hot even the squirrels are pooped!

For the last couple of days the temperature has been between 98 and 101 degrees F. While that's great for swimming, it's not so fabulous for the time spent out of the pool. But then again, I swim in an indoor pool, out of the sun because, hey, I work hard a being pale. No, seriously, I do. This is where I am thankful for free access to an indoor swimming pool, air conditioning, and fans. I certainly wouldn't want to be this poor little squirrel. He was sprawled out on my Grandmother's patio yesterday evening trying to get cool. More parenthetic and cute, he used his tail as a parasol to shade his head while he plundered the bird seed from my Grandmother's bird feeders.

I awoke about and hour ago sweating, which is never a good thing because I detest being hot and sweaty. Since the Gf's parents are occupying my bed the GF and I are in the living room. So I got up and turned the air conditioner a couple of degrees cooler and kicked it on 'on' which makes it run constantly instead of 'auto', turned the box fan up a notch, and parked my butt at the end of the sofa directly under the air vent. I'm nice and cooled off now. However, I have a head ache due to being up in the middle of the night and not having enough sleep. Oh well, I guess that's what I get for going to bed early. It also doesn't help that I awoke with a cat on my head. Yoda decided he needed to occupy most of my pillow again.

1st Quarter finished!!!!

I finished my 1st quarter at ITT Technical Institute last night. I now have a week off with out classes and homework to relax, do what I want for the most part, and get some stuff I've out off, done. My grades should be posted sometime during this coming week and I already know what I am taking next quarter.

I am hoping to work on a story, work on one of my in-progress novels, get some sewing, scrap-booking, and swimming done. I'll be juggling all that while doing stuff with the GF and her parents who are here for a visit.

Disturbing my inner zen

In the last couple of days, I've had a moment or two to scan some political websites I like to read. The GF and I don't have cable or local channels, it was a matter of cable or internet and since we would get more use out of the internet we chose the internet. Anyway, since playing catch up, I've learned some things that down right send ripples in my proverbial inner pool of calmness.

A.) Apparently President Obama and his goons are working to toss out the second amendment of the US Constitution. For those who don't know that's the right to bare arms. You know what I say to that. FUCK THEM! There's no way in hell I'm giving up my gun, or the guns I will inherit when my grandparents and parents pass. And there is no way I am giving up my swords or knives either. I'm a fat, white female. I neither know martial arts nor can I run that fast. I'm not helpless, but to quote the GF's father "It's better to be tried by 12 than carried by 6". Meaning it's better to go on trial for hurting or killing someone in self defense rather than to be dead in a casket and carried to my final resting place by six.

B.) I also learned that some college student and faculty at Georgetown want to ban right wing, conservative internet sites. They also don't want conservatives on TV or radio because they "corrupt" and are "dangerous" to their political agendas/values/ and what not. And this is while while they claim to want to "protect free speech".

C.) There is also the matter of a California High School suspending some high school seniors who wore white t-shirts for their senior pictures. Why? Because they claim that wearing white was other students were offended and threatened by their shirts and that they were also part of some white supremacist gang. But not all of the students wearing white that day are even white. At least one of the kids was Asian.

Frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of all this BS. I'm tired of people trying to take away my rights and those of others.

A frightening afternoon, college, and a note of sadness.

So while I was surfing the net I wanted to see if my blog came up under it's title, which I thought I had cleverly come up with. Turns out, on a bit of a sad note, that I wasn't the only one to think up "Foreigner in my own backyard" but someone else has that blog title. Although, they don't seem to be posting anymore. So, I shall have to come up with a new title when I get some time and can think of something more appealing than 'Kitty land'.

As for lack of posts and not being able to think very well, I have a damned good excuse. College! I'm coming to the end of my first quarter and I have finals and course projects to do. I'm so scatterbrained I'm not even sure when my last day of class is, not that the syllabi are really helping with that. Oh well, I'll just ask my math/problem solving teacher tomorrow, if I remember.

Yesterday was a terrifying afternoon. Most of my close friends and relatives know that my parents are paranoid and instilled a healthy sense of paranoia in me. So when I went to my parent's house the day before yesterday to check on my mother (her legs had been jumping the night before) and found the front door unlocked, it was a little cause for concern. At first I thought she might have been at my aunt's house across the street. So I went to see only she wasn't there. I went back to my parent's house and went up to her room to check on her. What I found scared the shit out of me. My mom's dog was barking at me and my mom was lying in bed not moving. I couldn't even tell if she was breathing or not. So I got closer and Kali, that's my mom's dog, got even more hostile which meant there was something wrong. Kali is always very protective of mom when something is wrong.

I called out to my mom and she didn't respond but her eyes were half open and glazed over and I started to panic. I grabbed the dog, tossed her out of the room and shut the door and slapped my mother hard in the face. No response. I checked for her pulse but couldn't find it in her wrist but I could see that she was at least breathing. So I slapped her couple more times trying to get any response out of her. Nothing. By that time my cousin Shi-chan had come up and was trying to help me wake my mom up. I thought if I pounded on my mom's feet (something she hates and would normally punch me for) that would get something out of her, it didn't. I panicked more and ran into my Dad's office and called him cussing and demanding for him to stop that he was doing and come home right then. He told me not to panic, that she has seizures like this and just to keep trying to get her to wake up and he'd be home soon.

It took awhile but we got my mom to wake up. She was in so much pain and so worn out. So Shi-chan and I stayed with her while the GF took care of the dog and paid the pizza guy. We'd ordered pizza for everyone for dinner. Mom wanted some company, not to be left alone, until Dad got home. After a little bit, I went to my cousin's to cool down and the GF went to work. I went back to my parent's after watching a movie and Mom was asleep. I asked Dad how she was and he said, "Well, she's bitching about stuff, so she's doing better." While that was a relief, I'm still freaked out about it. I've only seen my mom have the seizures where she jerks around and I've taken care of her through those. I've even come home to seeing her lying on the floor after a seizure, but this was by far the worst thing I have ever seen.

I checked on mom again last night to see how she was. She think I hit her hard enough to knock a tooth lose. I gave her a hug. She's better, but still sore and really wants me to hang out with her. I have some plans tonight but Saturday and Sunday I'm all hers, after I get my homework finished.

From flags to cameras to dancing in the street; there are just some things that shouldn’t be done.

Recently, as most people know, President Obama gave the order for the Navy Seals to eliminate Osama bin Laden. Okay, the man gave the order but he wasn’t out there putting his life on the line, nor did he pull the trigger, so really, I feel the Navy Seals should get all the credit.

Now that I’ve said my peace about that we can move on. I have heard that when American’s found out about Bin Laden’s death, there was dancing in the streets. First and foremost, I am not a fan of the Taliban or Osama bin Laden; in fact they pretty much disgust me beyond description. However, do we as Americans, want to display such low behavior as that of our enemies? Aren’t we better than that? I’m not saying its wrong for anyone to want to do that or that they don’t have the right, I just feel it’s a little vindictive and childish. Am I happy he’s dead? You bet, but I’m not going to run out in the street and dance about it. I say good riddance and go about my business.

Cameras, the joys of them are endless. You can take pictures of your friends, family, of strangers gulping down syrup at IHOP in the middle of the night, but camera’s in our school lunch rooms? Apparently in San Antonio, TX, they are wasting money that could be used to fund I don’t know say, music or the arts, science, or even school activities, on cameras in the lunch room. This is all so they can monitor exactly how many calories children are eating. Are you kidding me?! Apparently not, the cameras are said to be so precise they can identify a half eaten pear on a lunch tray. What I think these idiots who say this waste of money is a ‘good thing’ and ‘is to benefit our children’ need to realize is that, not everyone can afford to eat healthy, especially when you raise the prices on food. Some people have to get by on what they can afford and no camera monitoring what kids eat is going to change that. And what ever happened to privacy?

Lastly, a little bit on Flags. I own two, a small American flag and a small D.A.R (Daughter’s of the American Revolution) flag, and yes, I am a member of D.A.R. Being that I am a member of D.A.R, and even if I wasn’t, I strongly support the troops and Veterans. I’ve had friends who’ve fought in Afghanistan; family who have fought in other wars, so when I read an article about some jerk who burned the American flag and did $7,500 worth of damage to Louisiana State University’s historic war memorial, I got a little peeved. What I haven’t seen is the reason why this person decided to maim the memorial, not that I care much, it’s rude. Free speech or not, that was purely bad form.

As if that wasn’t enough, the vandal’s friend declared that he was going to hold a protest where he would burn the American flag because his friend was arrested. What?! Well, apparently he didn’t get to, thankfully there were enough patriots who went out and protested his protest. I saw one video where a soldier dressed in his BDUs went right up to the jerk and shouted at him “My brother died for you”! Good for that solider, I say. Too many people forget the sacrifices our troops make for us to keep us living as we do, to keep us safe. Vandalizing a memorial is a slap in the face to them, in my opinion, and burning the flag is a slap in the face to everyone who’s ever died to protect us and made this nation what it is to begin with.