2015

I have not had any desire to blog for the past two months.

I finally managed to talk myself in to doing it.  I suppose the beginning of 2015 is as good a place as any, to start.

New Year's Day, 4:30AM.
I stayed up until 10PM, to ring in the new year.  I don't think I'll ever be a "night owl".  I went to bed, and one point I had my usual unconscious thought to, "roll over" so that I wasn't taking up 75% of the bed, the way (Nick claims) I usually do.
I put a lot of power in to my roll, and it wasn't until I was in midair that I woke up and realized I had already been asleep on the edge of the bed!  Yes, I launched myself over the side of our bed.
Our bed is on risers.
And on the floor near our bed is my stack of books.

I landed.  Hard.
And because I had been asleep, I didn't have the presence of mind to do anything to break my fall.  I landed on my side, and my ribs took the brunt.

I was in pain.
"Walking it off" wasn't going to happen.

Of course it had to have happened 4.5 hours after our insurance deductible reset for the new year.
Of course it had to have happened on a day that my primary care physician's office was closed.
Of course it had to have happened several hours before an Instacare opened.

I was too much of a wimp to wait for Instacare to open. 
Complicating matters ever more was the fact that Nick had to work on New Year's Day.
I called my Mom.  She and my Dad picked me up and took me to the ER at McKayDee Hospital.  I bet they thought the days of taking their children to the hospital were over!

Surprisingly, the ER was a ghost town.  I was in, and out pretty quickly.
Diagnosed with bruised and broken ribs.

They drugged me up with some Percocet, and a Lidoderm patch; and sent me on my way, with a prescription for Norco, and more Lidoderm patches.

My parents were so awesome.  My Mom put me to bed at her house, and my Dad went and picked up my kids.  I slept for several hours.

The doctor said I couldn't exercise for at least three weeks.
I think recovering from childbirth is easier than recovering from broken ribs!  It hurt to do anything!  Especially, driving and sleeping.

January is definitely my leas-favorite month of the year.  This year, I suffered all month from the broken ribs.  And last year I suffered through the entire month of January with pneumonia.

Check please!  I am so DONE with the month of January.

Add to all of that a boatload of sickness and I think you'll see why I believe January is so miserable.
Each of the kids took a turn with the 24-hour barfs!  Let me tell you how NOT fun it is to push and pull a steam cleaner with broken ribs.

At least when all 3 kids had it, they slept a lot.  The only downside to this was that it meant that their (and my) bed(s) all were vomited in.
Elsa was sick on the day that they were celebrating her half-birthday at preschool.  It was so sad.

And to add to January's theme of bad-luck....  One day Cohen took a butter knife and stabbed our laptop screen.  It's an LCD, and the "attack" left it un-useable.  Toshiba wanted $400 to fix it!  And my good friend, Spencer, is so busy right now, that he didn't have time to fix it.

I really struggled in January.
I wasn't getting any exercise-induced endorphins.  And I was chowing down on all of the goodies, we had left-over from Christmas.  It was depressing to realize how much weight I was gaining.  And then, I got the ER bill.

It's enough to make a grown-woman cry.

But January did end.  And things got better.

The first week of February I was able to start running again.

I am ridiculously slow.
To the tune of 10+ minute mile averages. 
And for the most part, I don't feel pain in my ribs any more.  The only exception is when I sleep.  It's been almost two months, and I still hurt when I sleep.

And the laptop screen?
Well...  Back in September PC Laptops gave Yelp Eliter's passes to ComicCon.  When I picked up my passes, my contact turned out to be a guy that Nick and I had gone to Junior High & High school with.  Neither Nick, nor I; had been "tight" with that guy.  And when I first walked in to PC Laptops I know that the guy didn't recognize me.  The moment he did make the connection, though, he acted like we were old friends, and like he and Nick were best buddies!
I figured it wouldn't hurt to take our laptop to PC Laptops, to see how much they would charge to repair it?
When our acquaintance found out about the situation, he told the PC Laptop "Nerds" in the store to, "take care of us".  I thought it meant we'd get a 10% discount.
You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out that they gave us parts and labor for FREE.   That's right, we didn't pay a dime to get our computer fixed. 
Pretty Cool!

And just the news I needed at that point in time.