What a day.

                    Looks like I have some editing to do with my photos, since they came out GIGANTIC-sorry :-) I didn't realize they were *so* big when I posted the last entry here a couple of weeks back. I'll get on top of fixing that soon :-)

                    So now for the latest. I've been looking into colleges here in town, looking into which ones might provide the journalism program that I've decided I want to pursue, and I found one that offers it :-) Not at the level I'd like, but I can start out with it and then keep at it when I'm through. Hopefully then, we will be moved to wherever(as long as it isn't Texas!), a little more settled in, and I'll be able to get into a more involved program than the one offered here. I  can go as far as a master's degree here, but I would rather obtain it from a school with a better reputation than some local school in BFE, Texas ;-) But, as I said, the program here in town is a good start. I got enrolled for a few classes that I need to take/finish beforehand today, and should be done with those and ready to move on within a couple of months :-)

             Going back to our mini-vacation for a minute.......We got married September 7th, a day after my grandparents came to visit and just after we got back to town :-)  We decided to just keep it simple, went to the courthouse and did the paperwork(which was minimal, I was actually surprised that it literally only takes you signing your name once and bam! You're hitched :-p), and then the judge came over and took us out by the fountain beside the courthouse, and in front of this beautiful old cathedral, and about 5 minutes later.....I officially became the Mrs :-)  There is nothing that compares to the feeling of knowing that your best friend will be by your side for the rest of your life and promising that to them......I might complain about a lot of things(give me a break-I'm working on it! :-p ), but having the amazing husband that I've been so very blessed with will never be one of them, nor will it be something I take for granted. We've been apart, and we've seen what can happen and how quickly your life can change so drastically. After the year that we have had and everything that we have been through, I have never been more convinced that God made the right decision when he chose us for each other, and I have never been as grateful for something as I am for His decision to entrust this amazing man's heart to me :-) 

         Oooooookay, I think I'm finished with all of that "mushy gushy" crap....ha. Mister and I decided this week that November looks like a good month to visit Oregon. He's got a whole new family to meet, and I sort of miss everyone back "home," too. We are thinking it will probably be the last half of November, so we sort of get to spend a holiday there, and then we'll spend our first Christmas together here at home. When I say first, I mean the first that we have physically been together for, and first that we have as a married couple as well. We got married on our 2 year anniversary, and the last 2 Christmas' he has been away and we've been apart, so it'll be nice to *finally* get to celebrate one together :-) 

         As for today.......we took Franklin into the vet for some eye boogie issues. He had a bit of green stuff in the corners of his eyes, and, with his being mostly cocker, I've been told to watch for eye/ear issues, so I didn't want to let it slide. So, I scheduled an appointment and took him in to the vet, and we found out that he basically has puppy pink eye. No bueno! The vet gave us some eyedrops for him and said it should clear right up in a day or two. We also decided, while we were at the doctor and because Franklin will be turning 1 year in about a week, that it would be okay to go ahead and get his annual vaccinations/flu shot done. He got kennel cough(Bordetella) while he was away at obedience school, and canine influenza is going around terribly here right now. Good thinking, right? BIG mistake. We got home from all of that, and about 7:30 tonight, it was storming outside(lighting and thunder type storming), and Franklin was acting funny. Thinking he was nervous about the impending weather, I got the Benadryl out and as I was giving him a dose, I looked at his face and noticed it was completely swelled up. I finished giving him the medicine(knowing he was having an allergic reaction to his shots, the antihistamine helps reduce the swelling), scooped him up and drug Franklin, Mollie, and my darling yet oh-so-confused husband out the door and off to the vet hospital. The tech at the front desk tried to force about a zillion pages of paperwork on me before she could even touch Franklin(according to her), and in not-so-nice words, I may or may not have told her to "shove it" and yelled at her. What do you expect? His swelling had become worse during the car ride to the hospital, and I was pretty sure his throat might close up if he didn't get treated right away. Taking an hour to fill out paperwork while my pup lay in pain and suffered was just not on my agenda! Luckily for the stupid tech, my darling husband came in and intervened, and she took Franklin back to get steroid and antihistamine shots while Jeff filled out what needed to be. Turns out(as I already knew) mister Franklin had an allergic reaction to one of the vaccinations he was given today, or maybe was just on overload with being given 6 of them at once(one of them is a 5-in-1 shot), and the reaction is what caused his face to swell so severely. Poor little guy, his little cheeks were all puffed up and his eyes were swollen completely shut by the time we got into the hospital. Thank God it wasn't far away from where we live! I'm now up for the night with him to administer medication, but he's a tough little pup and is expected to make a full recovery :-)

Pictures from our little vacation :)

It's a wee bit late to be writing anything more than a quick few lines here tonight, but just wanted to post a few photos from this lovely little vacation we've taken this weekend to North Padre Island, Texas. So far(this is only our 2nd night here), we've gone down to visit the beach and I was able to get a few amazing photos of the coast and birds that are down there, today we visited the USS Lexington, a ship that was attacked multiple times during WWII up in Corpus(I got to go up on the flight deck, LOVED it!), and this evening we rented some poles and went out on this huge pier to do some nighttime fishing-I caught three itty bitty fish, and of course they all got tossed back in :-) Hopefully, when we get home I will be able to update a little more thoroughly, but until then...... :-)

Sometimes, you just need to vent.

Sometimes, it just feels good to let it all out. That's what my last post was about a few moments ago. I have, for the last year at LEAST, needed to just let this girl have it. Maybe some of my anger toward her isn't fair, maybe it's just pent up anger at other events that have happened these last 6 or 7 months, but there is honestly a LOT there to be angry at her for, and sometimes it just feels good to vent. I just started using this blog because I had posted a few things on my last one that I was not comfortable with everyone reading, so I guess I'll have to back up and explain a bit about the "last 6 or 7 months." 

        First of all, Jeff was wounded in combat in Afghanistan on February 16, 2011. Notification of that is something that I will never in this lifetime forget, much less all of the emotions that it kicks into gear. Our lives were turned completely upside down in a single moment, and we have been in Texas ever since, so he could recover. 

        On March 21st, he & I were out at the store to pick up a few things, and received a phone call where we were told our home was currently burning down. Yet again, in a single moment, everything was turned upside down, and we were going to have to start from scratch.

        Now that we've had time to get settled into a new place, life has slowly begun to slow down and we're working on regaining some sense of  "normalcy" in our everyday. With that, all these new emotions have begun to come out as well. On my part, it's a lot of feeling extremely blessed that Jeff walked away from an IED blast the day he was wounded, feeling lucky that none of us were back in Clarksville the day our home burned down. In the same breath, there's a lot, and I mean a LOT, of anger, that's come out as well. A lot of "why did all of this happen to US? What did we do to deserve all of these horrible things that have happened?" The only answer I have come up with is that the purpose of it has been to force us to realize how strong of a relationship Jeff & I have. I've never experience anything close to what has happened in these last months, and the fact that I have someone I can go to and cry & vent to, who understands everything and tries to understand everything that he doesn't....I absolutely love that I get to experience all of this craziness with this person who is both the love of my life and more importantly, my best friend. I don't believe we would be anywhere near as close as we are right now had these things not happened, and for that I am unbelievably thankful.

     But then I come back to this anger. I know it's awful to hate entire races of people, but I absolutely detest anything Muslim after what happened to Jeff. Any sense of empathy toward what happens to them, toward what happens to them in  their disgusting third world countries....that is completely gone. Do I care that we have men & women fighting in their countries and killing them because they can't take control for themselves and then they turn around and blame us and kill our soldiers? Absolutely. I care for each man & woman WE send over to fight these useless "people" who are incapable of doing nothing for themselves. It blows my mind that we send our people over to BETTER their disease-ridden country, and they do nothing but turn around and kill our soldiers. So do I care that they are dying everyday because they are too stupid and refuse to educate themselves to the point of being able to have a self-appointed goverment and a peaceful existence? Hell no. As ignorant as it may sound, I still say one big, well-placed bomb would be better than risking all of the American lives that we do just to be able to say "hey, we HELPED those people." And anyone who disagrees with that? Come to our house and listen to my love talk about his experiences over there in Iraq and Afghanistan, watch him struggle in dealing with the things he's seen and done in those places, watch how much he hurts when he talks about his friends who lost their lives because those Taliban "fighters" know nothing but violence, watch how angry some of those things make him and just how much it affects his day-to-day life.....and then tell me how much YOU would empathize with those people if you were in my place? I could try to be more open-minded to what goes on in the middle east, and the Muslim religion, but you know what? I don't feel any need to because of what I watch daily. So take that and think what you will of it, but that's my stance on the matter, and it will NOT change at any point in the foreseeable future. 

      There's a LOT of things I could sit here and choose to vent about, to be angry about. But at the end of the day, all I can really think of is how lucky I am that we are all still here. Does it make me angry that we lost our entire home to a fire? Absolutely. There were family mementos of both Jeff & I's that will never be able to be replaced. Does it make me angry that he has had and still has such a long recovery that he struggles with? Um......duh. I feel like I have no energy to deal with this stuff some days, honestly. It makes me angry at times to think that we had no say in us moving to Texas, and that some cowardly Taliban guy laid one halfway well-placed IED and dictated this change in our lives. But between him being wounded and the house fire, some days I look at it as 'well, I guess our slate has been wiped clean and we can start fresh.' That to me is a really good thing. I have this bad habit of being unable to let things go, of getting comfortable in certain routines and being afraid of diverting from those. This way, I've started trying new things I never would have before, of sort of stepping our of my personally set boundaries. I've gained a lot of confidence these last months that I'm not sure I would have ever gained otherwise. So when I think of what all has happened....I guess I tend to remember how blessed we are and how much I enjoy this crazy life that we've been given.