monday, december 31, 2001
ACK!

i just realized something: this is my very last week of vacation. next monday i start classes again. this has caught me completely off guard and unprepared and really not wanting to go. that last is very very bad. trust me. but what i want is certainly not at issue; whether i like it or not, i have to use this week to finish alden.nu and get myself to bed by 2 am and up by 10. the one real blessing is that i don't have a class before 1:30 pm.

but, then i started to really think about it and, people, this family is ending the year 2000 in a general ACK! kind of way:


ack!
alden.nu is turning out to be a far bigger monster than i thought. all my friends are now welcome to smack me one for wanting to put this particular domain online. (i highly suspect most won't because they love alden - they are the ones reading and reviewing my drafts of the stories and most of them seem to have fallen for my world.)


ack!
shay-shay is stuck on the roof yet again. why this cat even goes up there, i have no idea, but once she does she cannot get down for some reason. she knows where home is in relation to the roof and hangs over the edge crying at us. now we're not supposed to have a pet of any kind and i had hoped to keep shay 'hidden' until we could move, like we kept mercedes 'hidden' for about 4 years. this is not going to happen with the roof incidents. we even have a neighbor who is getting downright irritated with her. now, we weren't going to get her down because we figured she would find a way off eventually. but with the whole irritated neighbor thing we'll have to. so phoenixcat will be roof climbing in an attempt to get her down before someone reports there's a cat on the roof to the housing people.

but i just have a feeling linnorm is going to have to make room for one more cat in his life.


ack!
saxy's pc has been very dead. it won't boot up, it likes to illegal right after the password screen shows up instead. now, i used to format the old machine, but that monster had a particular sequence that doesn't seem to work for any other machine i know, so i have been completely at a loss to help him. he just spent most of last night trying to figure it out for himself and he's managed to get it up and running. he just can't seem to change the screen resolution and has at least 2 pieces of hardware with big yellow question marks that just will not install correctly.

don't look at me, i don't have a clue (and own a machine that has not needed to be reformatted in the 2 years i've owned it).


ack!
today is our 4th anniversary. we're unable to do anything special, no funds. so tonight the kids go to bed early and we watch movies, assuming the ex brings over the movies he promised. it is so hard to believe we made it this far! and things are still rough - he still has issues with the children. but, they seem to want him around now and i am still watching. it's scary that there's still a chance things will fall apart, but i have to take care of my kiddles.

but so far we're doing good. and even if we can't celebrate in a way either of us would like, we're still together and that's what counts.


ack!
saxy's still in limbo when it comes to the whole school thing. he's taking a break for the 5 week winter session and we hope to find a good educational psych to do the testing he needs during that time. then, i'll pay for spring semester for him. we both figure that, if nothing else, it gets me through the last quarters of my b.a. without having to hunt up a sitter. however, this perpetually broke state that goes with a nasty economy and 2 adults going to school looks like it's going to be even more depressing for next year: so far we've counted 6 movies we want to see in the theater in the first 2 or 3 months of 2002. to be honest though, i doubt one of us working would help the situation all that much. for a better future we have to go through what we're going through now. there's nothing out here except nursing and teaching, and both require an education beyond what either of us has.


ack!
i have mfa essays to do, like, yesterday!


somehow, all this seems an appropriate ending to this year. don't ask me why, it just does.