Deployment

Deployment Gods...Bring it on!  What else you got?

Where do I even begin?  This last week or so has been a year’s worth of disaster.  I have been hesitant to write anything about it because I was afraid of giving the impression that I was just a big bag of “O’ Crap, what happened now” bad luck!  That’s certainly how it seems.  But, Oh well…for the lack of anything else to write about it.

Last week started off with the dog, Bella, getting herself into some major trouble.  Bella’s story actually begins about a year ago when we rescued her from a local organization.  She was a sweet dog and loved the kids.  She needed some house training but I thought we could handle it.  Well, over the next year she managed to ruin the carpet in 2 bedrooms, a closet, and the family / play room.  That dog ate more garbage than a raccoon.  A complete scavenger.  She pulled up more than one dead carcass from the woods out behind our house…when I say carcass, I mean an actual animal carcass!  Needless to say, this dog had some serious abandonment issues.   

So, one day, Katie Beth walks into her bedroom to a big surprise, once again, in the middle of her bedroom floor.  I, at that point, had just about enough of this dog!  I tried to convince Katie Beth that we just didn’t have the time to retrain her and keep her from doing this over and over again.  Katie Beth, expectantly, balked!  She asked me to give her one more week.  Just one more week, I knew that dog was going to screw up in no time…so I did; I gave her another week.  I told Katie Beth that she had to sleep in her kennel until she could learn not to “do her business” in my house anymore.  That night, Katie Beth put her in her kennel along with Bella’s favorite bean bag that she slept on daily.  I warned Katie Beth it was a bad idea.  Little did I realize how true that warning was!

The next morning I get up and walk downstairs and to my utter horror I see what became of that bean bag!  It was scattered throughout the entire house!  Now, understand that the kennel was in the pantry, far away and fairly isolated from the rest of the house.  Oh, but that damn bean bag had, somehow, exploded…EVERYWHERE!  

We let Bella out of the kennel and outside.  She comes back in ten minutes or so later and marches straight upstairs.  I’m still attempting to “sweep” up bean bag pellets.  I go upstairs to get the kids when I discovered that Bella’s rear end had begun to shoot pellets all over the upstairs.  I almost collapsed right then and there!  It was a war zone…and I was now on the war path, with only one of us surviving this battle.

Now, I spent forever cleaning up that god-awful mess!  And just as I’m finishing up cleaning, I get a text from Steve.  I’m thinking to myself, “I so need to hear from him!”  I was so relieved to hear from him at that moment…or so I thought.  It was just at this very second, when I’m head to toe in poop and pellets, that my dear husband texts me to tell me he’s going on a 2 week TDY trip to the Netherlands!  The Netherlands?  Seriously?  I have to deal with this crap (pun intended) and you get to go off on a European vacation for 2 freakin’ weeks.  Oh boy!  I was a sour wet towel after that news.  Could not have come at a worse time.  I know I shouldn’t be bitter; I should be grateful that he gets to get out of Afghanistan, if even for a short time.  But, no.  I was not in the mood!

So anyway, back to the dog…I immediately took action!  This dog had to go.  It was her life or my sanity!  Luckily, I have a dear friend who helped me locate a new home for her with an owner that had the time and the care to retrain this dog.  Sucker! Under the circumstances that we are in, there was no way that I could effectively do the right thing by this dog.  When it comes down to it, she really was the “Worst Dog Ever!” 

That week ended with both laptops’ hard drives going straight into the crapper!  At this point, I just wanted to lay down in the middle of the street!  Everything we do, from communicate with Steve to Homeschool, to manage our finances is done on one of those computers.  Luckily, I had most…almost most…everything backed up on an external hard drive or an SD card.  But it didn’t save the fact that now I had to go out and plop down another small fortune on a new computer.  I’m just sitting back waiting for the other shoe to drop!  Right?  I’m thinking the other shoe is probably living in my attic right now in the form of a raccoon or a possum, so stayed tuned for news about that.  I’m thinking it’s probably going to fall through my bedroom ceiling and end up in the bed with us one night.  We’ll see!

The only thing that saved my sanity is being able to finally put to bed the worst couple of weeks with one of Katie Beth’s performances: “For the Love of Three Oranges”.  It’s an adorable play adapted from an Opera about a Hypochondriac Prince suffering from “melancholia”…Nothing can make him happy, except for the love of a beautiful princess, Ninetta.  As well as playing the part of Ninetta, Katie Beth played the part of Farfarello, a wind spirit, who sent the Prince and his jester away.  

At one point, towards the end of the play, the wicked witch, Fata Morgana, stabbed Ninetta with a pin and turned her into a rat.  Right at that moment, the lights went down and Katie Beth quickly puts on the rat costume.  Only, when the lights came back up, she had the costume (which was just a hat with a rat face and a robe) on backwards.  It was hysterical, and the audience loved it.  Katie Beth, being the professional that she is, didn’t flinch…she kept going…and the play was a huge success!  

Thank god for my kids…they are what keeps me ticking through these times! 

Until the next shoe drops….