Rabbit Holes

Busy.

This was a very busy few weeks.

You know those times when you are stretched in LITERALLY 8 or 9 different directions?  And each of those directions are important enough that you truly canNOT ignore them?

Yeah.

So....some of those "pathways" I was traveling came to happy destinations.

Some seem to be leading to strange rabbit holes that I am deciding if I should follow.

More of them are ongoing....

And others are just part of life.

This weekend my friend missed her flight because she thought her arrival time was her departure time.

Then...she realized she had not yet made the flight reservations she needed for the following weekend....even though she was SURE she had done it months earlier.

Another friend went back to the cleared-off lot where her house had stood to gather a few splinters pieces of her home for a project. 

She found one of the favorite outfits her son had worn as an infant half-buried under dead weeds and told me she remembered why she had stopped going back there.

Ethan's hermit crab was crawling UP the walls of his cage.  He was having a serious crab party.  This was possibly the 2nd time ever we have actually SEEN this crab in the year we've had it....he is honestly the most un-interactive doofus pet we have ever owned.  When I pointed it out to Ethan he started laughing and asked me what the crab was doing.  I replied that that I thought maybe the crab was just happy...and then totally flashed-back to grabbing the cage and crab food that night when we were fleeing the house and started crying because I was so happy that the stupid crab was happy (and I don't even know if Spider-Crab actuallyWAS happy).

I ran into a Wal-Mart employee I have gotten to know over the years.  I knew he had been "displaced" (which is the new PC way of saying your house was smashed on May 22nd and you are currently living somewhere you had probably never planned on being) so I asked him how he was currently doing.

He told me his brother --who had refused to leave his mold infested half-smashed house due to fear of looters --- had passed away last weekend.  Apparently the doctors said it was due to the large amount of mold he had been breathing over the past 3 1/2 months.

I went to a Dr. appointment and the tech ---while I was trapped cooperating nicely on the table -- told me how he and his entire extended family rode out the storm in a restaurant just north of the DZ* and upon exiting saw mass amounts of emergency vehicles rushing southward so he knew something bad had happened.

I went back to the warehouse and hauled the very last load of salvaged stuff (that's not holiday decorations because there is no where to put them in this new home).  

The "load" consisted mainly of extra lightbulbs and batteries from a drawer in the laundry room and loads of nails/screws/washers/anchors that somehow remained rust-less.

There was also an under-bed Tupperware box of wrapping paper.  

Bonus.

In the bottom of a really pretty drawer that made me remember how much I had loved my old-newly remodeled kitchen I found a little lamp.

It's just one of those "accent" lamps that stays on all of the time.

It had been in the white shelves next to the bay window that blew across the house....and I had NO idea how it had ended up in the tool-drawer.

We salvaged THREE lamps from my old house: Carolyn's beside lamp and the two bedside lamps from the basement guest room.

Since there was still an unbroken lightbulb I wiped off some of the drywall and plugged it in.

It worked.

????????????????

And I cried again.

I guess I may be traveling on this particular pathway for quite a while.

*DZ= Disaster Zone