Can I borrow an umbrella?

You know the saying when it rains, it pours. Well my life is flooding. Does anyone have an umbrella they can lend me for a while. I don't know how much more I can take before I just get in a boat and float away! 2008 has not been a good year for me.

Let me start from the beginning of the year and end with this weekend. My 20 year old neice who just had a baby last year is pregnant again and she got married on Valentine's day. I have not even met the guy and don't care too honestly. She quit her good job and now is unemployed. I am sure she is getting by with the help of my hard earned tax dollars, but that is a post for another day. Not long after I found out that she was pregnant, I fould out that my good for nothing sister is pregnant. She has nowhere to live, is on drugs and smokes like a train. She does not eat healthy and has never had any desire to have a child. I think I have written a post about her before, she is very immature and has no desire to better herself or be a productive member of society. She does not work and has never had a job longer than a month or so. Her boyfriend has been in and out of jail. He has one son that he was a less than good father to, so I can only imagine what he will be to this baby. They don't have anywhere to live or bring a baby home to. They don't have a car or anyway to get a baby to the doctor or anywhere else. I can only pray about this situation. It truly pisses me off!

My Aunt's girlfriend had an aneurysm a few weeks ago and is not doing very well. My Aunt is 6 hours away all alone having to deal with this and everything that it entails. Neither of them have any family nearby, so she is essentially alone now. This just breaks my heart! Also my Great-Aunt in another state just had a triple by-pass. She has had many health problems over the past year or so.

I think we may have a leak in the roof over our bedroom. We have not confirmed this, but I am almost afraid to know for sure. We have some sort of critter, think possibly a squirrel living under our bathtub in our bathroom. We can hear them in there. Scary, but we do not have the money to have them removed yet, so we just kick the tub when we hear them and try to scare them away, but they keep coming back. I am pretty sure that it is a squirrel. I think we live in the squirrel capital of the South. I have never seen so many squirrels in all of my life! The Christmas lights are still up on the house. We took down the yard decorations, just not the lights on the house. Last year we left them up all year. I am thinking we may do that this year too. The dishwasher is broken. When I called the warranty company they informed me that our contract has expired. Wonderful, even though they have not sent me anything telling me it was time to renew. Oh well next weekend after I open my new checking account I will renew our contract and have the dishwashwer repaired. Oh how I miss the dishwasher. My daughter and I washed about 6 sinkfuls of dishes yesterday. We had to unload the dishwasher and wash all of those dishes as well as everything else that was dirty. Back to the new checking account, I have had 5 NSF checks in my account in the past month! 2 of them were my fault, 3 of them were the bank's fault in a way, but I still have to pay for them. So hubby and I have decided to close out that account and open a new account for me at the credit union where he banks and where our savings account is.

Is your head spinning yet? Well I am not quite done. For the past few weeks the clutch in my car has been giving me some problems. It has gotten to the point that you have to have it pressed all the way to the floor for it to engage. We got in it last night to take our daughter back to her Mom's, got a few miles from the house and it would not go into gear. I finally got it in 2nd gear and drove it back home, afraid to take it out of gear until it was safely parked in the driveway. So now the issue is what to do with it. It is a '96 Accord, it has almost 200,000 miles on it. It needs a paint job, a new windshield, oxygen sensors, a clutch, and it has an oil leak. It will also need a new timing belt before too long. It has been a FANTASTIC car. It has been the only car that I have ever paid off and truly drove until it fell apart. I feel like my car knows me and I know it. The drivers seat just hugs me when I get in it. I cried myself to sleep last night thinking of how sad it is going to be when that isn't my car anymore. Getting rid of it brings us to another problem. We do not have the money to get another car right now. I really needed my car to last until next year when hubby's car will be paid off. Since that didn't happen now we are trying to figure out what to do. My SIL is getting rid of her car. It is a newer Accord and it is in great shape. We know the history of it. I think our plan is to get rid of my car and take that money to pay on hubby's car and try to borrow the money from the bank to buy SIL's car. Other "things" that go along with her car would be the higher insurance and the higher taxes and tag fees. Oh well, I have to have a car to drive and it needs to be a good reliable car. Good things about this car would be that it is newer and prettier than my car. It is bigger than my car, which would be wonderful. I can't tell you how often I have bumped the babe's head getting in and out of my car. I took some pics of my car today. I love that car!!!!!!!!!!

You see things have been pretty bad for me. Bad things just keep happening. I am usually a very optimistic person, but lately I am having a hard time finding a silver lining in these clouds.

Mrs. Plumber

Just call me Mrs. Plumber. In my house I am the one responsible for the plumbing, not that my hubby doesn't help out, he is just a procrastinator and so for him to actually get around to doing something, it takes a while. You see our icicle lights are still on our house, yeah it is April people and I still have Christmas lights on my house! In his defense he has been working 2 jobs and when he isn't working, he is either playing with the kids or sleeping. That means all the house work is falling back on me. Anyway I am getting sidetracked, back to my story. Monday night I cooked tacos for supper and the grease from the drained ground beef got poured down the sink. Well you know what happened next? Yes the drain got clogged! I didn't say anything, hubby was playing with the kids, so I go the plunger and tried to unclog it, but it didn't work. Instead all the water and yucky stuff ran into the dishwasher. GROSS! So I had to dip the water out of the dishwasher, so it would not overflow. We had some stuff for slow drains, so I tried that. On Tuesday morning I felt like the clog was gone. I had ran some water and it seemed to be draining, so I turned on the dishwasher and left for work. In the middle of the day I wondered where would the water from the dishwasher go if the drain wasn't unclogged. I freaked out a little bit and as soon as I got off work I rushed home fully expecting a flooded kitchen. Much to my surprise, the dishwasher had just backed up into the sink and then drained back into the dishwasher. So for the second time I had to dip nasty water out of the dishwasher. I got most of it out and put more drain cleaner down the sink and waited. After a few hours everything seemed to be fine, well the dishwasher is the real test, so I started it again. Again water was backing up in the sink so I just turned the damn thing off and went to bed. Yesterday I went to the store and got some Drano Max, poured it down the drain waited 20 minutes, poured some boiling water down the drain and voila, it was unclogged. You see hubby's solution to the problem was to call the warranty company and request a plumber, which would cost us $50.00 and I would have to take time off work to sit at home and wait for the plumber. Glad I didn't listen to him. My solution cost us about $4.00 and no lost time from work! Now if I could just find the time to fix the toilet in the kid's bathroom!