Future post

I really want to post about language development and my toddler, but time isn't on my side. One day soon - likely next Wednesday - I'm going to tell all kinds of great stories about Daniel, word recognition, and understanding concepts. It sounds all clinical and boring, but I promise it'll garner at least a chuckle or two. Happy Thanksgiving!!!

not much to say

I'm really in the mood to write. It's cathartic for me. It's really a shame I don't have much to say. What to do? Do I just ignore the urge and go read a book? Ramble on about what's happening in my life until something seems noteworthy? Ctrl + a and delete? I don't know. I haven't decided.

I used to think James Joyce was really, really weird. Stream of consciousness just seemed like a pitiful excuse for a writing style. Then I read Araby and I fell in love. I even thought that Araby would be a great name, for a while. Araby Rain, as a matter of fact. Now that I'm an adult (and a mother), I've changed my mind about that. James Joyce is now one of my favorite authors and oddly enough, stream of consciousness sits quite well with me. I guess nights like tonight are exactly why.

I can completely understand the need - or at least the yearning - to write. It's creative, and not just in the "I'd like to pretend I'm eclectic so I claim I can write" sort of way. Creative in the "I'm just stringing together letters, words, and eventually sentences and wow - look at that - they make a story" sort of way. Hence, I created something. I guess if I never come into my muse, if I never come across a story worth telling a thousand times over, I could follow Mr. Joyce's lead and ramble for a while.

I hope that one day my muse does find me. I can picture it. . . sort of. In my head, it's not grandiose. It's not a dream. It's not even a real experience that I can tell a story about. In my head, I'm sitting idle, in between tasks if you will. Let's say at a stop light or perhaps in an airport terminal. As easily as I can lose myself in a novel, I'm lost in my own thoughts. BAM! There it is. The whole story. Characters. Plot. Outline. Irony. Undetermined literary devices. I can really see it happening- snap - just like that. The outline will unfold on the back of a Continental Airlines "what to do if this plane crashes" pamphlet that I will shamelessly steal at the end of the flight. The characters names will be recorded as a note in my cell phone, later to be Googled to make sure they aren't porn stars. The plot? Well. Maybe it will write itself. Maybe it will be in my head, begging to come out. Maybe it will be half written in shorthand on my itinerary, barely legible. But for now, I'll just meander through my own thoughts and be satisfied that I got to write, even if just for a minute or two.

The luck stops here

Doug has what we like to call good-bad luck. The kind of luck where you're unlucky enough to be rear-ended by a drunk driver and have your car shorn in two but lucky enough to walk away with a smidge of whiplash. The kind of luck where bad things happen but no lasting damage occurs. Or at least, the bad thing could have been and probably should have been much, much worse.

Well, Doug brought that good-bad luck into our marriage and sadly, it will probably carry on to the rest of our family. The Careys have had a good run of good-bad luck lately, but I'm going out on a limb and saying that the luck stops here. If it doesn't, God help us! Well, God helps us anyway, but you know what I mean.

To kick off our run, I got a call from our windstorm insurance agent. For those of you who don't live in a wind zone in Texas, it's something you have to have when you live close enough to the coast to be heavily affected by a hurricane or "cyclonic weather event," as they like to call them now. The previous owners of our home had a new roof installed in January = good luck. The previous owners A.) chose a roofer who was not licensed in the state of Texas and B.) did not file the appropriate paperwork with the state to obtain a WPI-8, which you must have to carry your required windstorm insurance = bad luck. At any rate, we had to have an engineer inspect our roof to deem it windstorm worthy. That cost us $250 = bad luck. The repairs to bring us up to code cost us $500 = this one is iffy. Our roofer told us that the engineer could have "called" the whole roof, which would have cost several thousand to replace = good luck. Whew!!

I took my car in last August to have the tires rotated and haven't been back since. I know, I know. Terribly irresponsible of me. A few weeks ago, I loaded Daniel and the stroller into the car, headed to Discount Tire to have the tires rotated, and then walked to Chick-fil-a. I got a call from Sean. Sean said that my front tires were in such bad shape that he wouldn't rotate them = bad luck. Doug and I talked about it and decided that this was definitely a must-have. It just won't do to have mama and baby riding around on bald tires. Sean cut us a decent deal and thankfully, we only needed the two tires = good luck. That would cost us $300 = bad luck. But then we sold our old fridge and an old stroller/car seat combo on craigslist and made $240 = good luck.

Surely you get my point, but here's where the luck stops. The computer. Oh poor, abused computer. It was Doug's Christmas gift 3 years ago. Good machine. Paid a lot for it. Works like a beast. Last Wednesday, it went kaplooie = bad luck. We took it to EPO and had a diagnostic run. EPO man didn't see or hear anything that indicated that the hard drive was shot = good luck. We rebuilt the partition and lost everything = bad luck. It still didn't work = really bad luck. Doug had a flash of brilliance, cleaned the dog hair out of the tower casing, tried again, and it worked = GREAT luck! We almost spent $680 on a new laptop at Best Buy, but Doug didn't give up on the problem and voila! We had a near miss that could have set us back another several hundred dollars.

I'm not sure what lesson God's teaching us with all of this. Obedience? God is my provider? God helps those who help themselves? Luck really isn't luck at all - I know that. It really comes down to blessings and lessons. The blessings, I completely understand, recognize, and appreciate (most of the time, at least). The lessons? Still a little vague. And while I would love to know the subject matter before the lecture, God doesn't work that way and neither does life.