Philosophical Nonsense

I have missed my sister.  <3

Lennie has gotten much talller...that kid now reaches my shoulder (I'm 5'6") at the age of eight.  o.O

We (myself, my sister, and my brother-in-law) have been crazy busy at Mom's.  In the past 24 hours, we have managed to:

• Remove Mom's old dishwasher
• Install Mom's new dishwasher
• Paint and stain Mom's deck
• Kill off multiple wasp nests
• Cut down a largish lilac bush
• Cut down a medium-sized ash tree (deceased tree courtesy of the emerald ash borer)
• Mulch Mom's front yard landscaping.

I am pooped.

Boe, Maggie, and I are all at Mom's.  Boe and I have both come down with some sort of upper respiratory infection -- this is just indicative of how my holidays have gone lately.  :-/

Anyhoo, I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas!

Here's the game plan for Christmas On The Cheap(tm):

Each of the families (Dad and Bitz, Mom, Melanie et al., and Brett et al.) is going to get a little basket of household goodies, consisting of:

1. Set of 6 napkins, folded and displayed with...
2. Wire-wrapped and beaded napkin rings
3.  Set of 4 knitted cotton dishcloths
4.  Set of 3 knitted and felted woolen hot pads/trivets
5.  Packages of German roasted pecans and almonds
6.  Homemade dog biscuits for the families with dogs
7.  Catnip-filled fleece toys for the families with cats

The whole shebang should cost me less than $50.  For 4 families, that's pretty damned good. 

I also have a scarf knitted in seed stitch for Mom (her favorite stitch), a pair of really cute earrings for Lennie (the super awesome niece of amazingness), a cross-stitch of a cat that looks just like her cat Mittens for Lennie, and a pair of earrings for Melanie.

I was able to score Melanie's earrings for free through Swagbucks , the yarn for Mom's scarf was a gift, and I can use my employee discount for everything else except for the wool yarn I need for the hot pads. That I'll have to get from Michael's or Joann's, although Michael's will be easier for me as far as convenience goes. 

Our girl Melmel (who just got her first tattoo this week!) is getting a new phone, courtesy of a contract extension that we'll be signing.  I'm also going to go through my collection of romance novels and send some to her, as she has recently become a fan and by God I am glad she's getting over her Twilight obsession.

And now for the only Christmas splurge this year -- I have a Garmin GPS on layaway for Boe...shhhhh, don't tell him!

It has been a year since Fagan passed away.  I still miss him (hell, I broke down in tears talking with my mom about it today), but the pain has receded somewhat...I can talk about him -- most of the time -- without crying. 

Fagan came into our lives memorably...Boe and I were newlyweds in March of 2001.  We already had 2 cats in our apartment -- Frank was four? and Odin was still a kitten of about 6 months or so.  I was working at the plasma center as a phlebotomist, and often worked until 8 at night or so.  At 8 in the evening in March in Indiana, It. Is. Dark.  I pulled into the apartment complex parking lot in my giant 1987 hoopty station wagon, parked it, and walked up the front steps to the building...

Where a  black and white tuxedo cat sat on the top step.  Since I don't think it's weird at all to have conversations with cats, I asked him, "Hey buddy, who do you belong to?  Where do you live?"  The unnamed cat looked up and me, meowed, and trotted to the side of the biuilding, where he sat down, looked at me, and meowed again.  Well, I'm not ENTIRELY stupid, I can understand that much Cat Speak.  So I followed him.  He mosied his way to the back of the building, where the private patios were.  He walked straight up to my back door, sat down, and murrrrrred at me.  I tried to explain to him that we already had 1 cat over the apartment limit, that I couldn't take him in, and that I was sorry that I couldn't bring him in with me. He just sat there expectantly.  I went into the apartment, explained the situation to Boe, who reminded me we already had one contraband cat, we couldn't have another.  So I put some food and water outside for the patiently waiting tuxedo cat, and made plans to take him to the local cat rescue as soon as I had a day off of work.

The next night, the same thing happened...the tuxedo cat met me on the front stoop, followed me around to my patio, where I fed and watered him.  Then the cat would sit patiently at my back door until I went to bed. 

The night after that, it stormed.  Sleet, freezing rain, 40 mile per hour winds, the works.  Boe watched me set up a plastic crate with a flap to keep the rain out, towels as padding, and yet more food and water, carefully placed to avoid as much rain as possible.  Boe then sighed, opened the door, and let the cat in.  All Boe said to me was "Well, we'll just have to get a new place and get him neutered."  The cat just waltzed in as if he had planned this outcome the entire time...which he did, no doubt!

We had just over nine good years with him.  He was incredibly sweet.  Boe always called him Fagan, but after  a while I had given him quite a few nicknames:  Fatfat, Buttbutt, Mr. Butt, Chubby Boy, Little Dude, Mr. Pink Nose, Mr. Man.

Fagan was amazing, and we were blessed to have him in our lives.

My mom is going to pay for CNA (certified nursing assistant)classes.

 So.

When last we left our intrepid heroine, she was foaming at the mouth and not making much sense.  This may or may not have had something to do with my decision to try to go back to Brown Mackie College to finish my ever-loving occupational therapy assistant degree.

Hrmph.

Did you know, they refused to provide me a specific dollar amount for the tuition needed to complete my degree?  It's for a very good reason, I found:  I needed at least 80 credit hours to complete it, at $425/credit hour.  When I did *that* math, kids, I came up with a very, VERY disturbing figure:  $34,000.  To finish an Associate's Degree.  Uh...no.  Not when Boe's Bachelor's degree cost just a shade above that...no way, nuh-uh, no-how,  NO.  Absolutely not.

So.

I have applied to Ivy Tech Community College, where tuition is the much more reasonable $104.00 per credit hour, to join their Practical Nursing program.  It should take me a year, year and a half at the most (I plan to take classes next summer if that will hasten things along), I will spend WAY less money, and it's still the medical field.  So it's not all bad...*whew*

Mom offered to loan me some of the tuition costs with Brown Mackie (she really would like to see me graduate college some time before she retires -- I'm afraid I'm the child she worries about the most, since I'm the least practical), but when I crunched those numbers, I called her up and told her that there was no way in hell I was going to ask her to whip out her checkbook and write me a 5 digit loan.  I can't do that to my mom.  So I promised her that I would investigate three different schools (Brown Mackie, IPFW, and Ivy Tech) and let her know what I found re:  costs, programs/curricula, and transferability of credits.  What I found suggests that Ivy Tech's Practical Nursing program is the best idea, using those three criteria, for me to get out of this $10/hr ceiling that I've been dealing with since, well, graduating high school.

Since my depression began to lift back in February/March, I'm finding it easier to *be* practical...and this is the longest amount of time without a major depressive episode since 1998.  Maybe I'm getting back to being myself again!