It's been forever....

OK, so I haven't blogged in a really loooong time. Things have changed a LOT since then.

I'm no longer in TN.....My previously mentioned panic attacks got worse, I turned hermit, still no job, no income & living off my credit cards (yeah, I know!) by August of '08 stuff was starting to get turned off....like the electric, cable and phone. I still had electric until just after my birthday on the 21st of September, but without the cable I started watching every vhs tape and every DVD I owned, but then the electric went too. So I had nothing to do but read until it got dark, then light up a lantern until it was time to go to bed.

Of course all the bills were past due, including the house payment. And it chooses to turn cold early. With no electric I can't run the heater even tho it is gas, but it has an electric blower. And my waterbed heater was no longer keeping that nice and toasty. So I resorted to dressing warm, sleeping on the couch under about 5 blankets and encouraging all the kitties to lay on me. I was very happy that I had that wood burner heater in the living room and put all that firewood that had just been rotting away to good use.
For refrigeration I bought ice every few days and kept my few remaining groceries in an ice chest.

Did I mention my cell phone was also turned off in September, so I had no outside world contact. Later I discovered that my son had tried to call me on my birthday and got the canned message that this account was no longer in service. He tried to make contact with anybody in the area to send them to check on me, but had no luck.

By the time November rolled around, I had no food except when my neighbor would come by and drop something off...about every other day or so...and enough for one small meal was it! My cats were actually hunting things to eat...they put a serious dent in the chipmunk population! But I could not bring myself to stop them since they were actually eating what they caught and not just playing for fun.

After a non successful attempt to dispatch the entire situation by sitting in my garage with all my cats and my parrot and the engine running on my car.....5 hours in there and all that happened to any of us was feeling pretty warm and slightly dizzy! I just don't understand how folks manage to die every so often from fumes leaking into there car or into their house from the garage. Guess it was just God's way of saying you DON'T get to take the easy way out!

Anyway, I finally broke down and used my neighbor's phone to call my son and tell him my situation. He said he would come up and get me....I could keep my bird, one of the cats and some small furniture pieces, but there was no room at his house for all my stuff. Soooo before his arrival I contacted an auction guy who said an auction was no good for my situation, but he sent me several people around to buy a lot of stuff. I used the money from that to get the electric turned back on and buy a throw away cell phone and caught up on the gas and water bills. Then I started packing up.

But first I had to choose which cat I was going to keep....kept Sarge, the Himalayan.....but took the latest stray who wasn't in the best of health to the local shelter. Found a local no kill lady to adopt the other 3 and turned them over to her....sobbing like a baby the entire time......they were my babies!

My son, his fiance and a friend of theirs arrived on the Friday night before Thanksgiving. On Saturday morning one of them went down to the store and got poster board, made Estate Sale signs and put them up down on the highway in a few places. I didn't know they had done this but suddenly people started showing up and within about 20 minutes there had to be 50 folks wandering all thru my house and all over my property! Nothing had prices on it...it was like a free for all with the kids hollering up and down the house and up from the garage....how much did I want for this or that. I was running back and forth all over the place selling stuff myself and giving them prices....but if I was busy, they just sold stuff for whatever the heck they figured they could get. The only 2 bad things from all that was a set of vases that I dearly loved and didn't want to sell at all got sold for about a dollar.....and my almost new Oreck vacuum cleaner that I paid almost $400 for got sold for $5......eek!

But we made a bunch of money, rented a truck and loaded my motorcycle and the stuff I was taking with me, and my son took off in that by Sunday afternoon, with his fiance and their friend following behind. I stayed and packed a few more thing in my car and attempted to get some sleep to leave in the morning for the drive back to SW Florida. But I woke up after maybe getting one whole hour of sleep, aching knees, and groggy headed. I put Sarge in his carrier on the back seat, put Woodstock in his small travel cage on the passenger seat and departed the house about 4AM for the supposed 13-14 hour trip.

It was about 35 degrees! I stopped to fill up the gas tank and it took me almost 15 minutes to be able to stand up...and I'd only been driving for about 30 minutes so far. The rest of the trip went the same way....every time I'd stop for gas or a potty break it would take me longer and longer to be able to stand up and walk. Guess all the running up and down the stairs and the hill had put the finishing touches on my already bad knees. So I didn't get to Cape Coral until almost 9pm. And it took almost a month before I could walk normally again.

More about living with my son Robert, his fiance Lexi, and their baby Riyah in the next blog. FUN........NOT!!!