3rd Annual Crippled Critter Benefit

We have a date and a starting point and we are getting ready for this years Crippled Critter Benefit event.  Dixie Thunder of Aiken County holds an annual event to help support the animals in our private sanctuary for disabled pets.  In the last 2 events we managed to get a small kennel built, a gate built into the kennel and wheelchair ramps that not only assist me, but help with our blind animals and our seniors so now they have no stairs to go up or down.  Local donations of dry dog and cat food kept us going, our animals don’t eat dry food as a total diet, they are fed raw meats and kibble food is mixed with a dehydrated raw food prep kit that makes a healthy warm stew.

Over the past year a friend brought us a load of salvaged insulation and we have been able to insulate my office which is where I spend about 16 hours a day.  My office is a seperate building 53 feet from the house, the kennel is built between my bedroom door and the office so to go from office to room / room to office you must pass through the kennel.  This means I am able to give 24/7 care to all animals.

The problem with this arrangement though is that when the wheelchair ramps were built to allow me safe access to the kennel it ate up lots of kennel space and caused a danger we didn’t know would exist.  With little room to maneuver wheelchair or scooter cats tails are at risk.  Ok..you might be laughing now, but running over a tail can actually lead to paralysis of the tail and if the cat tries to get away the cat could sever the nerves at a point where bowel or bladder nerves are damaged rendering the animal incontinent or worse, unable to release meaning they have to be manually expressed.  Rolling over a cats tail is actually very dangerous.  I also have blind animals that don’t move in the right directions, they are getting better now that they know the scent of my tires, but that is unpredictable.

This year the plan is to raise enough money to fully enclose the entire property giving the animals the full area to roam.  Because this will be visible from the road it must meet with all nuisance ordinances and must also be feline proof.  This of course raises the cost.  We might work with our regular chicken wire and with plastic lattice since lattice is less costly  and is not an “eyesore”  We will sandwich tarps between the chicken wire and lattice for privacy so the dogs won’t be barking and people will not have to see the animals.  More space for animals always means healthier animals and humans so this is where the Crippled Critter funds will be used this year.

This is the flier in circulation:  If you wish to help promote the event you can click on the flier to see and download the full size one.

 

Please tell me it’s time for a break

We have been doing pretty good for a little while, I guess it was time for something bad to happen.

My last update was around my birthday which in spite of a sprained wrist went pretty good. Shortly after my birthday Amy got some fleece and had spun some yarn during a nice peaceful outing at Hopeland Gardens. Life was pretty good through August…what happened?

The other night my son went to do a load of laundry and heard hissing coming from the area where the water heater is tucked away. He pulls away panels to find the outlet pipe spraying water and the floor soggy. Uh…that’s not good. Have no clue how long it was leaking but we do know it put the floor in the utility room in a very unstable condition. No shut off valves…do they do this in all mobile homes? We had to cut all the water from the curbside tap.

Next morning we go off to building supply to get new pipe and a piece of wood to repair the soaked area. Josh was doing a great job, got most of the fittings in place and was shifting the water heater back into it’s cozy little nest when the bottom pipe decided to fracture dumping gallons of water and the tank was in trouble. Particle board does not hold up well to flooding. Josh yells for help and of course I can’t get in there on wheels so Amy runs in, he tells her to get the garden shears and hacksaw, he’s got to cut everything loose before we lose the water tank.

Amy runs…then falls and scrapes up her knee…does manage to get the shears, She’s cutting the electrical while Josh is frantically sawing off water pipes to haul the half full water tank out to the porch to finish draining.

Well…we knew we needed to replace the utility room flooring due to a pipe disaster a while ago, now we have no choice but to replace the floor…right now. No time to raise the funds, that comes out of grocery, bills….uh…wherever the money usually goes it’s not going there this month because now we have no water and a floor too unstable to be safe.

Off to the lumber supply today to drop some of our bill money on building supplies we couldn’t afford for the last year…and still can’t afford…but have no choice. No time to look for salvage lumber, no time to look for sales we need it now.

So we get there and manage to get the lumber, stared wide eyed at the cash register like children wondering how those things can count that high then get outside with our neat carrier filled with stuff we couldn’t afford to find A FLAT TIRE!!!

My Goodness how many FLATS have we had!!!!  Tire salesmen can eat healthy on the amount of rubber we keep buying

So here is how our day went…We got some plywood, some OSB, some nails, tons of plumbing fittings including a freaking shut off valve, some lengths of pipe, throw my wheelchair on top and limped on a flat tire to the nearest gas station.

It’s not too bad, not riding on the rim yet…I figure we can slime it and get it home.  We don’t want to call a wrecker and don’t want to buy a brand new tire after unloading money two days in row to the tune of $160 at the building supply.  So

We slimed her.  After Amy pulled the bottle away she got spit on by the tire blowing green florescent slime at her just to add insult to injury to the lady who has a scraped up knee, little sleep, in the hot sun after loading up wood, late for work in a parking lot with a flat tire.  My poor wife has had a BAD few days.

We did manage to get the truck home safely and Amy took the car into work.  Right now my boys are pulling up the vinyl flooring to tear out all the wet wood.  We are rebuilding the utility room floor.  We will tear apart an old stove that we were suppose to haul off to the dump ages ago.  Glad I never did.  I keep these things because there is a wealth of reusable material.  Why do you think the recycling centers want them?  Anyhow, we will tear all the metal off the stove and sandwich metal between two sheets of plywood to go under the water heater and washing machine.  The metal sandwich will offer strength to these heavy appliances and if any of them should leak again it won’t be leaking onto particle board but onto a 3/8 sheet of plywood with a metal barrier underneath.  It’s much easier, cheaper and safer to replace one single 3/8 sheet of plywood than to replace a whole huge section of waterlogged subflooring.

The OSB will be used in the areas that are not holding weight or subject to water pipes or water appliances.

Hopefully out of all this crap a few healthy mushrooms will grow, in a few hours if all goes well I’ll have a new laundry room floor to show off.

URGENT! Michie is suddenly homeless and needs help!

Michie has a problem! On Monday Michie was thrown out of her house byher Husband! He has told her he does not love her and doesn’t want anything to do with her. She is sleeping in her car! She has Been to the Housing to see if she can get a place with no luck! she has no money as he drained the Bank account! Her name is off the lease! She has contacted a Lawyer who told her to try to get housing. She is living in her car with no money! Please help if you can!

This is urgent, please help if you can.  Michie is on Microgiving and has given this 501c3 organization all evidence of Identity and personal income for a need she had for her son.  Her level 3 status on MicroGiving means she’s a real person and she has given evidence that she’s the mother of sons one of which is disabled and before this incident happened her income was low.  Now it’s not just low income that is her trouble it’s low income and homelessness.  Please help!

http://www.microgiving.com/profile/michie

You can donat here:  http://stormys.chipin.com/michie

My Birthday Outing Pics

My Birthday was August 9th

I had sprained my wrist on Aug 7, it’s my right wrist which is the only part of my body that works 90% correctly. Well anyhow…the plans I had for a free trip out were pretty much shot. I couldn’t use my scooter, walker or wheelchair. I was telling a friend what was going on. I was really depressed as Amy and managed to get my birthday off, we rarely have her home to any holiday, let alone a birthday. Finally by friend got hold of me and asked if Amy would be able to push me in the wheelchair on pavement…yeah…I guess she could, but we can’t do any kind of free outing and have her pushing me all day. It would be no fun for either of us. I HATE, being pushed and I know it’s a wear and tear on her body and that would bother me the whole time. Well my friend didn’t have that idea in mind, she had remembered quite a while back when another friend had wanted Amy and I to have a dinner out and she funded an evening for us to go out to dinner and coffee…we had taken pics of that night. Lori wanted to give Amy and I that same night for my birthday since it wouldn’t require me to propel my own chair and Amy wouldn’t be pushing me very far.

So….My friend Lori send me a birthday gift along with this note, that was for Amy:

DO NOT LET HER worm out of this! Get dressed. Make plans. Get the hell out of there for a little while. . HAPPY BIRTHDAY BECKY! YOU helped me enjoy our wedding anniversary by taking loading those pics off my mind. Now stop arguing and say thanks. . We love ya’ll!

LOL…so Amy promised her cell pics as proof…here was my day:

First we made a trip to a chair accessible part of the Savannah River in SC. I was able to just roll down the hill to the shore, later she was able to bring the truck close enough so I only had to take a few steps to get into the truck so that worked out perfectly.

Course Amy got in and waded…we make it a practice to clean up places we visit, so she was pulling trash out of the water.

We headed out a beautiful scenic dirt road back to town:

Ran outta battery juice so I didn’t get pics at the buffet…but we did go out to dinner and the cell stayed charging in the truck. Next we got our rare treat of Starbucks coffee!!! Now THAT is a Birthday Gift!!

Uh…excuse us…we are goofing around in Starbucks

She stole my whipped cream! Can you believe that! She told them it was my B-day they gave me a size larger and charged us for the regular size and they loaded me up with whipped cream and all that gooey terribly bad for you dark chocolate syrup..and she just reaches over and grabs a fingerful!

I came home to tons of happy birthday wishes on FaceBook and that brought tears. It’s so nice to know you are thought of and remembered. I know some of my FaceBook friends are here….Thank you friends, it really did mean a lot to me.

Since I couldn’t make it to Allendale SC to view the Topper Archaeological dig site like we had hoped, we will plan that as another outing sometime next month, but today was special and perfect…couldn’t ask for better friends & family who made it all happen.

The Purpose of Marriage

Recently after voting YES to permit same sex marriage I found myself in a debate about marriage equality.

People of opposite sex marriages don’t want to share the title of marriage with people of the same sex.  It is said marriage is about love, commitment.  Having your relationship blessed by your chosen spiritual force.

Well if marriage was simply about love can’t you just slap a ring on your hand in front of your priest and say I promise to join together till the end of my life?  Wouldn’t that make you married?

If that was all marriage was, promise to remain together till death and asking my spiritual force to bless my union then, guess what everyone…I’m already married!  Yes in front of witnesses in a spiritual group we promised our lives to each other and asked our spiritual leaders to have our union blessed.  I’m married!!

But that isn’t all it is, is it?  You and I both know if marriage was just about promising your love before a God then we wouldn’t have this debate.

So what is marriage? if not a commitment made in the presence of God.

It’s about something more isn’t it?

A marriage
contract is a legally binding commitment made in the presence of a legal authority, and is
valid until the contract is broken. It is a commitment that is kept until
one spouse, or both, fails to perform according to the contract.

Ahh…this is more like it. Anyone can promise before their God and have it witnessed and then call themselves married.  To have your marriage legal though you need a contract.

Why on earth do you need to have your loving spiritually blessed promise to God turned into nothing more than a man made state witnessed legal contract?

Oh….That is because not all marriages actually work.  Evidently no matter how much you promise before God, you need to plan for the possibility of one day having a separation of your union…then who is going to help you?  God doesn’t come divide up your personal property, grant custody of your kids to you because according to your promise to God, you were going to stay together till one of you died so there is no need to separate material items is there?

You need to make this contract before man so that man can intervene on your behalf if you break your promise between yourself, your spouse and your God.

So now we have come away from the religious union because God doesn’t need man made documents does he? Now we are into nothing more than a contract between two people and witnessed by the state.  A promise to join together as a single unit and share all rights and responsibilities.  No religion enters this contract…it’s all man…it’s what you do before you even bring your union into the church.  Sad really….if Marriage was all about a promise between the couple and God, why stop at the county clerks office first?  Seems God isn’t quite as important in keeping your marriage sacred and bound…you need a legal contract made my man?

No.  I don’t really think that is true.  I think marriage walked out of the church kicking dust up at God’s door and took up home in the state.  Now you have to go through the state before you can even make your promise to God.  Through society evolution, God become secondary in your sacred marriage and I have no clue why the Church never fought to keep Marriage in the church in the first place and have the state set up it’s own civil union contract.  People united by a faith organization wishing for that legal protection could get that if they so wished.  If someone didn’t want to go through a church they could get a civil union agreement only.

Wouldn’t THAT have kept marriage sacred and holy?

The church should have and still could be able to decide who gets a certificate of marriage (or whatever a union is called by the faith group)  Then when one says “I’m Married” it implies they were married in a church of God according to Christian law and their union was blessed by the faith leader.  Isn’t that how it was suppose to be?

So how about this:

Every legal citizen in America of legal age has equal access to the legal civil union contract that protects you in case of divorce and allows you over 1000 other privileges in the United States that has nothing to do with the church.  If the church refuses to witness your civil union and sign a “marriage” contract well then..you are not married.  You are legally united…but not married, call it something else.

I’m not married to my life partner, I’m not Christian.  We are happily Hand Fasted.  Our union is a sacred bond between us and our blessed Earth Mother who brought man and woman together to create new life, but did not force love and life union on her children nor did she set boundary of love or union only between opposite genders. 

Opposite genders come together to procreate because each gender carries a part of what is needed to make a complete human.  Nobody can really deny that, but love and breeding are not the same thing.  People who hate each other can breed, even a sick disgusting rapist can steal the use of a womans body and make a child…I’m sure that victim has no love for that man even if life was started in her body….only people who love each other can commit their lives to each other and expect to live happily ever after.  Love knows no boundary of gender, skin color, physical traits etc…that is attraction.  We seek out the opposite sex and physical charectaristics that attract us for breeding reasons.  Consider the evolution of blond hair and blue eyes during the upper paleolithic period. 
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Frost_06.html

“A
potential mate will respond not simply to a bright color
but also to a rare one that stands out from the crowd”

In the harsh lands of the late stone age when more men were dying from having to range further for food, the women were securing their species with differences in charectaristics that would attract humans together procreate…I wonder how many of them were married?  LOL…that’s right that was before the Bible and long before marriage contracts.  They came together to breed and didn’t necessarily form life long unions.  They all took care of each other as a tribe and at that time it’s pretty clear nobody really knew who the baby’s daddy was so the child would have belonged to the woman to continue the tribe and a man was welcome at the hearth to hunt while she kept the babies alive at the breast to carry on the species.  There was probably a promise to provide for the hearth and I’m sure they worked at bringing forth more babies especially since life was harsh and many didn’t survive.  Nobody knows if love was actually a part of all this…it’s a natural arrangement for survival or self and species.  Love might have been a part of it though.

A couple might have gone off and formed their own tribe when more room was needed and so on, making the smaller families we know today with a male hunter and provider and of course a man to keep the species going, and a female gatherer and carer of children.  Convenient union of course.  We really can’t survive without both genders, without cooperation of both genders, and without the ability to reproduce our species.  Still…this doesn’t imply love bound a relationship together or even that there were any spiritual laws about same sex love, affections or even life long unions.  It was about survival.

Where did love and procreation get mixed up? 

Ah…I know…it was when the species needed to not waste their seed (cuz they had no clue they had a ton of it)  Wasting your seed on the wrong sex produces no children.  Gay men were putting the reproduction of the species at risk in the eye of the past ancient man who could not forsee the overpopulation of the earth and had no clue that sperm was pretty plentiful.  That is why a man should not lie with a man as he would with a woman….how are you going to keep the species alive that way?

Ok, yeah I can see the point of the past build upon fear of the unknown.  This is today, we are over populated and have no reason to worry about the countinuation of our species.  We can relax now.  We have so many babies being born that abortion clinics have revolving doors.  We really can slow down on the breeding now do you think?  Maybe we can concentrate on families built on love and the emotional desire to spend their lives together, share property, raise children, help in the care and support equally of children born into the family.  Opposite genders are not needed to build a family anymore, just like we don’t need to hunt to survive or live in caves.

We have evolved.

I think the word Marriage belongs in the Church, not in a civil union contract.  The word marriage should be stripped off from the state contracts and given back to the church.  A legal birth certificate is different than the Church baptismal where the child is recognized by the church and formally taken into the fold why shouldn’t the church be able to provide it’s own marriage certificate for couples joined together in God’s house just like the certificate a child gets when he or she is cleansed of sin and presented to God for acceptance.

I was legally united twice.  Both times we had a Justice of the Peace, not a minister of faith, witness promises and union.  It was called marriage, but I don’t think it should have been.  It wasn’t a promise before any God, we didn’t ask for God to bless our union, in fact we specifically requested the words God and obey be excluded from the ceremony.  My sister was married in a Church and she got a church certificate of marriage.  I think it was done right in her case.  I think perhaps the word Marriage was taken out of the the church and put into the states and it never belonged there.  It now causes the religious issue.  The Church doesn’t want gays to use their name for the promise made to God.  I don’t blame the Church and feel they have the right to claim that name.

I think we should give it back to them and allow ALL relationships to form civil unions.

My New Air Conditioner

Thank you Mommy!!

We were going to buy the cheapest one they had at Lowes but it was only 5000 BTU and would only cool 150 sq ft.  I have 288 sq ft to cool and we were afraid the AC would either run constantly our would burn out quicker so we went for the next size up.  This is what we got:

This is the advertisement from Lowes

$149.00

Cools room sizes up to 240 sq. ft. or 16 x 15 ft.

Full-function electronic controls with remote for precise temperature management from a distance

Adjustable thermostat

8-way air direction control

Anti-microbial filter reduces bacteria, room odors and other airborne particles for a cool, comfortable environment

Multi speed fan cools down a room at the rate you decide

Pleated quick mount window kit included

I dropped off the AC and some car repair parts from AutoZone then went out to do some groceries.  Josh installed the AC while I was gone and I came home to a nice cool dry office…it’s SWEET.  I can’t thank my mom enough for helping us with this.  It was needed so badly and I know she can’t just pluck $100 out of her wallet like it was nothing, there was sacrifice involved in that gift and I really truly appreciate it.

Excited about a new Fund Raiser

First off I need to thank my friend Lori for the idea.  I met Lori online about a year ago and we have been communicating ever since.  She is a fellow do it yourselfer and we often share ideas for using salvage materials for home repairs.  Lori has her own booth on Bonanzle where she sells her hand crafted items to supplement her disability income.  She lives with a painful neurological disorder and is raising her own kids plus a niece.  Her home and vehicle seems to be always crying out for some kind of repair too.

She thought it would be a good idea for me to open a booth.  I laughed and said…with what.  I have nothing to sell!  We can’t afford to do crafts and if we could I can’t do much in that area, Amy can, but often we have no money for craft supplies.  When we do buy yarns or materials it’s for her to make winter socks, leg and arm warmers, hats, mittens etc.. things our family needs.  Our income is strictly budgeted to cover our bare basics and what we might have left over is usually sunk in either car or home repair needs.

She says…well I can donate a few of my things for you to sell through your store.  I thought that sounded pretty good, she makes some really nice things.  I gave her my log in stuff and asked her to set up my booth because I have no clue how to sell things.

She set it up and loaded in a few items, then had the idea of taking some of the pics of my animals and some pics of Amy and I at our local fund raiser events and using those listings to tell a bit about our family and why this kennel build is so important.  Some of my friends who are also on Bonanzle liked the idea of contributing items to sell through my booth. 

Soon Peg asked me to select a few items from her booth and she would load them into my store for me to sell for the project.  Peg has a really nice store full of beanie babies she too is an animal lover and rescuer.  Now I had more items and as the booth started finding viewers another friend wanted to make me a banner and she helped me find my way around a bit.  She’s also going to make a digital art piece to sell through the Crippled Critter Booth.  Karri makes some awesome digital art and she has a booth on Bonanzle.

I started to promote the booth a bit and Sherri a friend on many other sites I am a member of wanted to contribute some Avon Items to sell through my booth.  Sherri has a hard life but she is a strong, loving and supportive person.  She has a lupus which is a very difficult disorder to live with and her husband lives with cancer.  This wonderful couple has learned to support each other through illness and recovery time and again and try to make ends meet with Sherri’s Avon sales.  Please do check out her booth, you just might find something you didn’t even know Avon sold.

So now I have an active Bonanzle booth.  I told my mom about it and she will knit a pair of socks to donate through the booth.  Speaking of my mom.  She donated funds for me to buy a new window air conditioner so I won’t be swelling up and suffering in the South Carolina heat.  Both of our AC’s blew within days of each other.  Thanks to some online advice my son is able to run his on low and it’s a bit more tolerable in his room.  Mine is worthless and needs to be replaced.  My mom more than anyone in the world knows I’m a strong survivor and when I complain about something it’s because I have already tried to live with, repair, replace, or raise what is needed to handle the problem before I reach out for help.  I do have a lot of pride, it’s all I have that is mine and totally mine, I earned it through being strong and adaptive.  It hurts my pride when I can’t do something on my own, and since my pride is all that I have that is truly all mine and 100% earned by me…I don’t like to put myself in a position where I lose pride in myself.  There is no pride in begging…so I don’t beg.  I acknowledge that I need help and when help is given I have a perfect history of always repaying or paying forward MORE than I received because nothing comes free.  To me donations are not gifts…they are debts and if I don’t repay the donor, I’ll pay it forward every time.  That is the only way I can accept a donation without hurting my pride.

Back to my booth…LOL…check it out.  All funds raised or donated will go towards building a stockade style fence to surround an acre of property as well as a feline containment netting system to prevent cats from escaping the kennel.

This is the stockade fencing panels available at my local Lowes.  You can click on the photo for more info from Lowes.  This is what we intend to surround 3 sides of our property with.  The rear half my property is on a tree line and we can re-use the existing kennel walls
to build that fence wall.

We will need feline containment netting and for that we will need several pipes, the cheapest is low grade conduit pipe with T adapters on the top.  Nylon netting will be stapled along the fence walls, then a cable strung through the net which will expand 4 feet away from the fence and threaded through the T’s at the top of the pipes driven into the ground.  Then all the cables will be pulled tight and we will have a 4 foot net canopy that will top cats from climbing the fence and going over the top.

We have an acre of land, but are unable to use it until we put up a fence.  The reason…it’s pure and simple.  My neighbors do not like us because we don’t live the way they think we should live.  We live the way that suits our family.  We are a non drinking family, we don’t do drugs.  We are not materialistic and don’t spend money on making the outside of our home pretty. We like to hang our granny panties on the clothesline instead of using an expensive dryer.  We offer love and care to special needs animals and devote our life to them and to recycling, and reusing discarded items and supplies for our family projects.  This is us…we don’t like nor want a pretty property with perfectly trimmed grass and trees.  We don’t want to live quietly inside our box…I mean home and make our neighbors happy.  We want to be outside making something useful out of whatever it is we happen to find.

We don’t buy if we don’t have to and we use odd materials like tires, washer tubs, etc for our own projects.  Come on…don’t tell me you haven’t heard of building with tires or using washing machine or dryer tubs to plant in?  They are huge and already have drainage holes and you can usually find them free.  Same with tires.

Check out this Tire Retaining wall…now that is a great way to build something…dunno if I like the color though.

Here is someone using a washing machine tub as a planter. 

Old refrigerators, freezers and bath tubs can be laid down on their sides filled with rocks and soil and make an excellent raised garden bed.  There are so many ways to use “junk” if you are allowed to collect it in your own yard.  I’m in a wheelchair and I would love to garden, but we need to have raised or hanging gardens for me to do that.  Gardening would greatly reduce our food bill and with the economy growing worse by the day growing your own food is the most logical way to make sure you can eat properly.  Why should we be living with constant complaints for trying to improve the lives of our own family through the reduce/reuse/recycle method that has been taught to everyone since grade school?

Yep I might be crazy…but check this out, what a way to recycle an old bath tub turn it into a sofa!

Many were happy for us when a wheelchair ramp was built.  We heard questions about when we were going to get rid of this pile of scrap lumber.  It looks like crap…when are you going to get rid of it?  Why do you have all that stuff there?

Well this pile of 20 year old salvaged lumber from a donated deck that was cut up with a chain saw and trucked here

Was turned into a very useful wheelchair ramp which also serves as a ramp for elderly, blind and physically challenged animals

We do things differently but our “junk” collections have purpose.  We reuse and recycle as much as we can.  It’s earth responsible and it’s financially responsible.  Why go buy something when you don’t really have the money and you can pick it up for free because someone else threw it out?  Had I been ordered to remove my collected salvage because it was offensive to neighbors I would not have a wheelchair ramp today and someones discarded deck would be filling up the landfill instead of going to good use.

We need the fence so we can continue with other projects that our family needs.  We can always find salvage…we just need a place to keep it and since we have an acre of property we should be able to keep it here.  Our animals deserve to use the entire property too, there is plenty of room for them to roam but we can’t build a chicken wire kennel where it can be visible from the street or along neighbors property lines.  Our kennel is small and they deserve more room as do the humans in our family. 

Since we are paying for an acre of land it would be really nice if we could use it

Just a few more setbacks

The month of July didn’t start out so well for us.  Again I had been expecting some money coming in that didn’t come in.  I was told last month that it wouldn’t be late again so I thought it was safe to budget on it…well that was another mistake and my car insurance bounced on me again meaning that when my SSI check came in I had to cover the insurance out of the general bill account and also the late fees.  Two payments were missed that I had budgeted on that that messed up our whole financial system for about 3 months into the future.

Just to make things even more wonderful my wheelchair tire blew out on me!  That day sitting in the heat in a chair that was hurting my hips like crazy I noticed my window AC was frozen over.  My son’s had been doing that too and we couldn’t figure out the problem but when his room is too hot he can go visit the neighbor.  When mine started doing the same thing, well I’m stuck in one room with nowhere else to go and on this day I was in serious pain from sitting in chairs that I can’t position correctly in.  Argh…not fun!  Well we went out the next morning to try to replace this tire.  Bike shop was closed so we went to the department store.  Evidently finding a 24 X 1 3/8 inch tube is not as easy as I thought!  Not a single store had them!  Finally I’m hot, sweaty, in pain and frustrated and my son says lets just try a 2 inch tube, the worst that will happen is it won’t work.  Well the tire was damaged too so we got the tube kit that has that slime sealent stuff in it.  Thankfully my sons idea worked…one less problem.

Get home and it’s hot as…well you know.  Not a single AC is working!  I hopped online to get some fast ideas.  I got some good advice and we went out to get a few things to try to clean up the AC’s and prevent the ice.  My son’s kinda drools cool air now if it’s on low.  Mine is icing up worse now that we cleaned it!  We had needed to replace my other son’s AC but now we have 2 and 1/2 dead AC’s.  My sons can always spend their days at their friends house and it’s much cooler at night.  I however am stuck in one room all day, every day and I will need an AC in my room.

I reached into my bookbag for something and found out the screen on my camera is smashed.  My camera is used as part of my position for another non-profit I work with.  Now I will have to replace that!  Luckily I can do that pretty cheap, I don’t need a fancy camera just once that does video and still shots.  It’s just yet another aggrivation.

Finally the last straw…or maybe the last strap….we were headed out to a store to get something else said to help with the AC and my heel strap broke on the shoes I use with my braces!!  I attached it with a rubber band but that throws my whole gait off and is dangerous.  Now I had to buy another pair of shoes!  I don’t walk much, I don’t need shoes…but I need them to hold my braces on which hold my feet and ankles in the right position so my feet/ankles don’t roll over and sprain when I stand up.  Really….this has been a crappy month!  I’m sure I could have found a much better place to drop $20 than on a pair of shoes!!

I had some donations on a site where I am trying to raise funds for home repair and modifications, I can’t get a payout there though so those funds are useless to me so right now I don’t have that extra side cash I had been depending on to make ends meet…I guess that little bit of hope is gone now.  My ac’s are blown, I’m running on a temporarily inflated tire, my car is off the road in need of radiator work, the truck is still running but it needs transmission work.  We need to open this yard up!  There is absolutely no way I can cook in my office without AC that is just dangerous and the yard has needed to be opened up with privacy fencing for a few years, now it’s urgent we get this done so we can collect salvage materials to start our gardens, repairs and modification.

These last few months have SUCKED!  I really need to find some kind of Internet job I can do at home, we can’t keep living like this.  I have skills…..just they are useless.  My skills are wonderful to donate, I help out with Wembaster duties, forum/egroup admin, management of calendar, blog, photo gallery, member support and communication.  Lots of people are glad for my donated skills and I can offer about 16 hours at second and third shift hours…nobody wants to hire me for a real paycheck though.  I am lucky to earn spare cash now and then, then I depend on it and it’s gone and we are left spinning in the wind like a leaf spiraling to the ground.

Thanks for letting me vent a little, I’m so sick of this!  Anyone hiring?  I’m a great web mistress

Blew a tire on my wheelchair!

Ok, that is no fun!  I’m sitting there then all of a sudden a strange hiss of air.  Looked down and my tire is flat.  Ok, yeah I know tires go flat, but there is something unsettling about a tire going flat in your wheelchair.  Tire goes flat on your bike and you can walk it home.  Goes flat on the road…well you can still sit in your car comfortably till help arrives.  When it goes flat on your chair you can’t sit in it, you can’t move as easily as you could 2 minutes ago.  It’s hard for me to use other chairs to sit in, transferring is extremely painful on my knees and hips.  I have great difficulty getting out of any chair, but with my trusty wheelchair I can push the chair towards my legs as I’m trying to stand so my legs don’t wobble so much which reduces the pain and stabilizes my legs which reduces the risk of collapse.  Wow…when a tire goes flat you really do realize just how much that piece of equipment has helped you and how totally lost you are without it.  Amy set me up with her office chair…I can’t move the chair!  My legs can’t push the chair backwards or pull it forward.  My insurance payment bounced this month, yet again I planned on money that didn’t come in so now I have late fees, we are eating ramen and veggies till payday and now my freaking tire blows out on me!  I did not need this.

Our New FirePit

After returning from camping and realizing how much easier cooking over fire is, and how much I missed it we decided to scour our yard for stuff I could use to make an accessible fire pit.  We happened to find this round, heavy cement pipe.  Have no clue how it wound up in the woods behind our house but well…it will make a great fire pit.  We salvaged some cement blocks from a burnt out house and filled the bottom to allow for ash/coal fall and to raise the fire to a good cooking height.  We reused a stove grill from our old dead stove which we will use to cook on.

Here is a picture of the fire pit with one of our cats laying on it.  Don’t worry, Chester is brain damaged, but he knows enough to try to lay on the pit when it’s hot

I was informed last night that the annual Crippled Critter Benefit event will be held on September 29 this year with a rain date of October 5.  This years goal is to completely rebuild a kennel, but this time we will enclose the entire property.  The wheelchair ramps really ate up a lot of space in the existing kennel leaving little space for the animals.  Little grass and brush grows and since this is intended to be natural habitat that brush is needed.  Cats love to build nests and dens in brush and in the summer months they lie in the cool tall grasses.  While the always have access to an air conditioned space, they prefer the outside as most cats do.  Grass is also needed for proper decay of animal matter and the space is needed for both humans and animals.  Having a large animal family enclosed in a small space with humans is not the best environment for anyone.  We plan to concentrate all efforts through the summer and fall to fully enclose the hard with a feline containment system and privacy fencing since our neighbors do not like the way we store salvaged scrap, or like to see or animals.

We are extremely involved in reuse/reduce/recycle.  If there is any possible way to reuse something, or recycle something we use those options before buying something new.  We are trash pickers, scavengers…we use what others toss away and we shape it into what our needs are.  This is environmentally, socially and financially responsible…however many simply don’t see it this way and they complain about “junk” visible on someones private property and unfortunately for us, they have all the rights and we must enclose our yard to prevent them from seeing our salvaged items that we plan to use for recycling.  It’s sad when environmentally, socially, financially responsible people have absolutely no rights.  People just toss stuff away, let it enter our landfills which overfills them and causes problems for everyone.  People who prefer to collect this stuff for reuse or recycling are seen in such a negative light, yet reuse and recycling is known and proved to be beneficial.

Anyhow, the only way to keep our animals and family comfortable is to properly fence in the entire property including privacy screening and that is our current goal before we start using reuse/recycle items for our gardening and kennel supplies.