A Work at Home Mom’s Blog

I promised myself that when it quit being so oppressively hot, I was going to start taking a walk every day. Well, it’s certainly not hot now, but I have yet to motivate myself out the door. Not good.

I really want to drop some pounds for health reasons. I can’t work any weight loss pills into the budget, so I really need to set up a diet and exercise routine. It’s just really hard when I have no energy whatsoever to work with. But I still need to try.

I’m going in for that sleep study in a couple of weeks. Hopefully that will put us closer to finding the root of the problem. I hope it’s not apnea because I really don’t want to wear one of those cumbersome masks, but I’ll do whatever it takes. I’m tired of being tired all the time, and I’m ready to get on the right track for better health.

I’m the world’s worst dancer, and I know it. I did some clubbing in my younger days, but I would never get on the dance floor. One of my best friends kept begging me to get out there and dance, and one night I finally gave in. In less than a minute, she was begging me to stop.

Still, I’ve been known to break into a happy dance every now and then. I think there’s something inside everyone that just makes them want to move when they’re happy or excited. Snuggle and the hit show So You Think You Can Dance realize that as well, and they’ve taken the opportunity to ask contestants and viewers to show the world their happy dances.

So what does this mean to you? Well, it means that you can make a video of yourself doing a happy dance, upload it, and possibly win a trip to Los Angeles for the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance! Afraid of making a fool of yourself? Don’t be. Check out this guy, who fell flat on his butt and still won week one:

Snuggle is a perfect sponsor for this contest. They’re launching the new Snuggle with Fresh Release, a fabric softener that keeps your clothes smelling fresh all day long. If that doesn’t make you feel like doing a happy dance, I don’t know what will.

So you think you can do a happy dance? Well, head on over to the Happy Dance Contest page, check out the rules and guidelines, and start taping! You could win a trip to L.A. or other great prizes! And if you just can’t bring yourself to show the world your happy dance, at least go check out the other videos. There are some real gems.

The opinions expressed on this site are those of the author and are not endorsed by FOX, 19, Dick Clark Productions, or Snuggle.

Here’s the last of my posts about the places I’ve called home over the years. If you’ve missed any of the previous ones and would like to read them, here’s the list:

• I Must Be Crazy
• The Early Years
• My Bachelorette Pad
• Into the Mountains
• Living With the Parents the Second Time Around
• Movin’ on Up… Sort of
• Another Dump
• A Home of Our Own… Sorta

Once we found out we could no longer keep our mobile home on the rented lot we had, we started looking at our options. I put it in the paper right away, but I also put an ad in there looking for lots for rent. We didn’t have the money to have it moved, but we were just sort of hoping for a miracle.

The miracle of being able to move it didn’t happen, but another one did. We found a fixer-upper house for sale, and to make a really long story short, we got it. And now we’re calling it home.

There’s plenty to find fault with here, for sure. It could stand to be completely replumbed, the floors in some rooms need to be redone, the dishwasher that I was so glad to see turned out to be broken, and we will need to put in another heat source before winter rolls back around. Oh yeah, and did I mention that we have a slight snake problem? (Hubby fixed the place where that one got in, so I hope we won’t see any more!) And yet I’m still quite happy here.

My favorite thing about this place is that it’s so peaceful. I don’t mind having neighbors somewhat close by if they’re good ones, but living as close as we did to our landlady at the old place was hellish. When she wasn’t being hateful to us, she was staring as we walked from the driveway to the house, and when she couldn’t find anything to do to try and get under our skin, she was bickering very loudly with her family. Compared to that, having not another house in sight is pure bliss.

There is still some of our stuff that I need to find a permanent place for, especially in my office. But this place is already feeling very much like home. I hope there comes a time when we will be doing well enough that we can sell this place and buy a newer and larger one, but I think I’ll be content where I’m at until that time comes.

Okay, I’m picking up where I left off in my home posts. The last one had me living with my in-laws (which was more fun than a barrel of monkeys… NOT!). Once Hubby found a new job, though, a new place followed soon after.

Had I had many options, this place certainly wouldn’t have been my first choice. But it was there, and it wasn’t my in-laws’ house, so we jumped on it. It was yet another mobile home, not in as good of shape as the one we had left, but better than our first.

We had to clean it up before we moved in, but the landlords knocked off some on the rent for that. I noticed that it was drafty, but I overlooked it. Then winter set in, and it really started to suck.

It had an oil furnace which seemed to work fine, yet the heat only came out decently in the master bedroom and bathroom. Pumpkin’s room, the living room and the other bathroom stayed ice cold. The kitchen was tolerable. We told the landlords about it, but they kept putting us off and saying there was nothing wrong with it. We made it through that winter with kerosene and electric heaters, and with Pumpkin sleeping with us.

Summer came, and we gave up on getting the heat fixed, hoping we would get moved by the next winter. We didn’t, and so the whole runaround started again. The landlord finally sent some people who hadn’t a clue what they were doing to look at the furnace, and they said it was fine (which it was- it was the ductwork that needed help). We kept after him, and he finally said someone else was coming. But we couldn’t be there that day, so the landlord had to come let him in. Of course he maintained that everything was fine, even though you could see your breath in Pumpkin’s room.

I ended up getting a good job, and we saved up and bought our own mobile home. I was so glad to get out of there. But as I’ll discuss further in my next home post, it was kind of like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

Day 6 of my NaBloPoMo home posts, and still going strong! Yeah, I know I’ve got 24 more days to go, but hey, it’s a start.

For those of you who haven’t been reading regularly, I’m writing about the various places I’ve called home over the years to start out (and in effect writing a highly condensed version of my life story in the process). Here are the previous posts in chronological order if you care to catch up:

• I Must Be Crazy
• The Early Years
• My Bachelorette Pad
• Into the Mountains
• Living With the Parents the Second Time Around

So now I’m at the point where my life completely changed. I was living with my parents again, and was trying to pick up the pieces of my life and make a fresh start. I befriended a guy who lived in the town where I was working, and started spending a whole lot of time with him. Eventually we kissed, and before I knew it we were moving in together, getting married, and expecting a little one. All of this actually took place over the course of about a year, but it seemed much shorter than that. At any rate, that guy turned out to be Hubby.

Going back to the home theme, our first place was a real dump. It was a tiny trailer at the top of a steep hill, with lots of very strange neighbors. We lived right next to our landladies, and they kept their goats in our yard. (At least we didn’t have to buy a lawnmower, because we certainly couldn’t afford it then.) You could look out the window across the fence and see huge rats running back and forth from a barn to a pond. Yuck.

As cruddy as that place was, I was happy to be there. I can’t say that the year we lived there was a bed of roses, but there was lots of love in that little place. Pumpkin arrived, and things were that much sweeter.

We eventually found a place without critters included that we could afford, and we moved. But that’s a story for another post.

I’m going to be cutting it really close this time, but so far I’ve managed to post every day this time around in NaBloPoMo. Yay me!

So I left off in the saga of the various homes I’ve had where I was moving back in with my parents. I would have preferred to bite copper nails in two, but that’s the one place I’ve always been welcome, no matter how at odds we were. Seeing how I didn’t have anywhere else to go, I bit the bullet and went back.

Things were a little better that time. Mom quit waiting up on me or insisting that I wake her up when I came in, something that drove me nuts when I was there before. I didn’t mind it when I was in high school, but I was in my twenties when I moved out the first time. Come on.

They did want to know if I wasn’t coming home at all, but at least they didn’t raise cane and demand to know where I was so they could come get me (like they had frequently done before). So while things were less than ideal, it wasn’t as bad as I imagined it would be.

My job was in the area where I now live, about an hour and a half from the parents. The pay was horrible, but I was gaining some management experience and decided to keep it until I found something else. But I ended up meeting a sweet young man, and started spending much of my time on this side of the state line. I wasn’t even remotely looking for a relationship, but we clicked and became good friends. I started spending a few nights a week with a mutual friend of ours (whom he was also staying with) to save gas and give me somewhere to hang out that I could stay out of trouble.

That eventually led to me moving yet again, and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

The second place I called home was my only bachelorette pad. It wasn’t much, but I’ll never forget it.

I lived with my parents until I was 21. I had planned on getting my Bachelor’s degree, but by the time I earned my Associate’s I was more interested in partying than school. That, and I really didn’t see the point. I wanted to own my own business one day, and I didn’t feel that I needed a four-year degree to do it.

Anyway, once I got out of school, I just kind of floated through life for a while. I worked full-time, but I also partied full-time. My parents didn’t like that, and once I got a job that paid substantially more than minimum wage, I found myself an efficiency apartment and moved out.

The apartment was in the heart of the nearest small city, where I was working, and which was about 45 minutes away from the parents. Actually, the apartment had at one time been a hotel room. It was tiny, but I had room for all of my earthly possessions. And most importantly of all, I had freedom.

I didn’t stay there much. There were times when I was there during the week and gone for the weekend, but other times I would stay gone for weeks at a time. I rarely had anyone over due to lack of space. But I did hang out with the landlords on occasion. They would send me out to get drinks after work in exchange for sharing with me.

I kept that place for about a year. By that time I was practically living somewhere else anyway. More on that tomorrow.

The first place I called home was, of course, where I grew up. My family moved in when I was six months old, so I have no recollection of where I lived before that.

That was the first, and only place my mom and dad ever owned. It was in rural southwest Virginia, and it was right up the hill from my paternal grandparents. They had given (or maybe sold, I’m not sure) my dad some land, and they bought a mobile home to put up there. But it was a three bedroom model, and there were the two of them plus three kids. My big sister graciously shared her room with me until I was about 6, and then they built on.

My dad did most of the work himself. He added on two more bedrooms and a den/dining room. He did a great job, but I’m not surprised. He was one of those guys that could do just about anything he set his mind to. He became a trucker before I was born and made it his career, but he had done all sorts of stuff before that. And the things he hadn’t done just seemed to come to him naturally anyway.

The place where we lived was pretty peaceful. It was on a hill at the end of a dead-end non-state maintained road. We had a big front yard, and nothing but mountains behind us. When I was young, most of the neighbors were awesome. I spent a lot of time at my mamaw’s, and I sometimes went to my cousin’s house to visit his wife (she was a sweetheart, but I never cared much for him). One of the neighbors at the other end of the road had an above-ground pool, and they invited me down to swim in the summers. The ones across the road from them had two girls who were a little younger than me, and I went down and played with them often.

Things have changed in that little hollow over the years. The neighbors with the pool and the kids moved. Not far, but far enough not to be my neighbors any more. There have been a few move-ins and move-outs since then, but one place is now abandoned and the other is now home to some really major snobs. My cousin’s wife died in a car crash. My mamaw also passed on, and they rented her place out for a while and eventually sold it to friends of my dad. They were nice, but they bought another place a few years ago and gave that one to their daughter. And she has let it go way downhill. It’s practically uninhabitable now, but she still lives there.

My dad passed away three years ago. So now it’s just Mom up there on the hill. At least it’s still pretty peaceful up there. She doesn’t have much to do with the neighbors, just keeps to herself and has friends over every now and then. I don’t get up there much because of life and gas prices, my sister lives 4 hours away but gets up there when she can, and my brother doesn’t live too far off from her. He sees her the most of any of us, but he has a busy life too.

So there’s my first home post. Hope I didn’t bore you to death with it. Things will get more interesting with the next couple, so stay tuned.

I tried participating in NaBloPoMo last November, back when it was just a one-month deal. I made an effort, but I didn’t quite get a post in every day. I decided I wouldn’t bother participating again.

Now they’re doing it every month, but I still wasn’t going to bother. But I got an email about the theme for June, and I couldn’t help myself. I signed on, and maybe this time I’ll be able to follow through.

So what was this awesome theme, you ask? Home. It’s a subject that’s near and dear to my heart right now, considering all that we’ve been through over the past few months trying to make sure we would have a home. So I’m going to go for broke and give it a try once more.

I’m thinking I’ll start off with a post each day about all of the different places I’ve called home. I’m not sure yet where I’ll go from there, but I don’t think I’ll run out of things to say about the subject before the month’s out. Now if I can just find the time to post every day, all will be well.

I was up late last night trying to get some work done. I called it a night at about 2:30 this morning. Hubby knew I came to bed late, so he didn’t pester me this morning when he got up to leave. I woke up and told him goodbye, then turned over and dozed back off, hoping to get a few more hours in.

Pumpkin got up, but she came and lay down with me. I dozed back off again, only to be awoken a half hour later by the dog. She was ready to get out of her dog box (which is her temporary doghouse until we get her a new one). I got up, let her out, and lay back down. I began to lose hope. When the phone rang right as I was about to doze back off, I gave up.

Hubby is off at his regular job today, but is working on a side job cleaning out a hardware store that has been sold. He has been bringing home a lot of stuff that the guy told him to either throw away or keep. He called a couple of hours after I got up, saying he was on his way home with a load of lumber and needed help unloading it. Not thinking clearly since I was still pretty tired, I slid on my wedge sandals and headed out.

I quickly came to the realization that those shoes were not going to work for the job. It would have been okay if we were putting it in the bottom of the garage, but it had to go in the top. That meant going up and down a fairly steep hill, and I nearly fell a couple of times. So I headed back in to put on my sneakers.

On the way in, I walked by his utility trailer. Somehow I managed to stub my little toe on it. Not just barely stub it, but hit it so hard it felt like it was going to be torn off. The toe didn’t get torn off, but the nail came halfway off. Ouch!

I hobbled in, put a band-aid on the toe to keep from tearing the toenail all the way off, and put on my sneakers. Then I hobbled back out and got back to work.

The pain subsided considerably, but going down the hill was murder. It still hurts to move it. I suppose I’ll live, but I’ll probably have to refrain from wearing sandals for a while. And I’m lost without my sandals.