Re-posting

I am putting this up here again because I pushed it off the top way too quickly with my electricity rant. This is too important to let sink quite so fast.

This is WhyMommy. She is a beautiful, young, incredibly articulate woman, wife, and mother. And she has breast cancer. That, of course is not all that defines her but right now it is the unwelcome focus of most of her days.

She has a type of breast cancer most of us know very little about called IBC or inflammatory breast cancer. WhyMommy writes about it here, she can explain it much better than I.

Please read her article. Then, say a prayer for WhyMommy and her family and tell her story to everyone you know. I managed to get to 48 years old never having heard of this kind of cancer and I am sure there are many many people like me out there. We need to educate ourselves and we need to support each other. Thank you WhyMommy, for telling your story and sharing your struggle with us. I'm praying for you.

Good news!

My electricity is fixed, more about that later. :)

Right now I just wanted to say - I've got a themed post in TopBlogMag - so please click on over and take a look! It's my first time so please be gentle.

And ... I'm not sure why that guy is wearing a bra!

********************************************
Okay. I have a picture of the culprit here. The round fuses were the ones I was aware of. The long ones that look a bit like a shotgun shell - I didn't know existed at all, much less in my fuse box!

Apparently the bigger fuses are some kind of main fuses - there are only 2 of them and 1 controls the front of the house and one controls the back. So why all the other individual fuses then? Seems redundant to me! Regardless of my opinion though, the big 60 amp fuses DO exist and now I have backups and know how to check and load them.

Wish I had known that last night, I wouldn't have spent the night tossing and turning and gasping like a guppy - thinking I couldn't breathe! I sleep with a ceiling fan above me every night, winter, summer, doesn't matter. I like the air moving and I like the noise, it's soothing. Not having air conditioning is something I could have dealt with if I just could have had my ceiling fan!

Not having the TV to keep my mind off not having the ceiling fan which would have kept my mind off not having AC was the last straw. I admit it, I am pathetically, totally spoiled and dependant on all the conveniences of American life. I am the poor woman's Paris Hilton. Now that's sad.

To give credit where credit is due - it was the best boyfriend ever who came and showed me the hidden fuses and saved my pampered butt! What a guy!!!

Not a happy camper

I was vacuuming. Okay, I know it was around midnight but I am not a day person. The chairs in the living room are pulled away from the windows so I could vacuum behind them - a small side table is sitting by the front door - there is a pile of laundry on my bed to fold. Then the power went out. Okay, the power went out in the front of the house, not the back. The front is where I live, it's where the bedrooms are, the only bathroom and the living room. The kitchen counts too because basically the front of the house constitutes the original layout of the house. Starting at the laundry room back - is the addition to the house. That's where my son has nested. It is basically a big family room and he has made it his own while I have made his original bedroom my bead room. But I digress.

So there is no power in the front of the house which means no air conditioning. We only have window units to begin with and they aren't so great but they are better than the outside air right now. It's not incredibly hot if you look at the numbers but it is crazy humid out there. So, there is power in the back of the house, ah ha! It means a fuse has blown.

I got a flashlight and went out to the garage because that is where the fuse box is. The garage is on the same circuit as the back of the house so I was able to get the door open. But - that is where my luck ran out. We have those old screw in kind of fuses, not those nice switches that are so easy to reset. This is an older house that was never updated, I don't own it I rent it, so those kinds of upgrades are definitely not something I am going to do. I took the flashlight and checked all the fuses but they all looked fine to me. To be sure, I unscrewed each one and removed it, replaced it with a new one, when there was no change I unscrewed each one and put the original back in. The only one I didn't do that with was the one that controls the back of the house because obviously that one is just fine.

Standing in the garage, in the dark and humidity, trying to change outdated hot to the touch fuses in the early morning hours when I know I have to get up in the morning is not my idea of a good time. The sweat was literally running down into my eyes. Still - I could not find anything wrong with any of the fuses.

So now what? I really hate to act like a girl about this, but you don't call the electric company if it's obviously something within your own house do you? Do you call your landlord and wake her up in the middle of the night? Not that I could find her phone number right now anyway. I am literally at a loss. So what do I do? Go to the one thing that is working for the moment, my laptop. It's on battery power so I will be turning it off soon, but I needed to rant!!!

This is the one type of situation where I wish I had a male partner of some sort, here full time. When something breaks or needs lifting or something like that, I wouldn't mind a bit of testosterone around the house. And I might add that this is also the time when I am cursing out the former boyfriend who talked me into this house when I was looking for a place - with promises of - we'll do this to it - we'll do that - uh - yeah. I do not like this house and I have not liked it from the beginning. But right now I don't have a whole lot of options.

So - I will have to figure this out in the morning when I can at least see where I left my GOOD glasses, not this pair I managed to grab by the lenses from an end table. Silly though, I don't want to turn off my computer. I go to bed with the TV on every night, with a sleep timer. Turning off my computer really makes it dark and well - boring! I guess I like to be entertained to sleep. But I have to turn it off for now.


Good night all - hope your night is better than mine!

This is WhyMommy

This is WhyMommy. She is a beautiful, young, incredibly articulate woman, wife, and mother. And she has breast cancer. That, of course is not all that defines her but right now it is the unwelcome focus of most of her days.

She has a type of breast cancer most of us know very little about called IBC or infammatory breast cancer. WhyMommy writes about it here, she can explain it much better than I.

Please read her article. Then, say a prayer for WhyMommy and her family and tell her story to everyone you know. I managed to get to 48 years old never having heard of this kind of cancer and I am sure there are many many people like me out there. We need to educate ourselves and we need to support each other. Thank you WhyMommy, for telling your story and sharing your struggle with us. I'm praying for you.

It's not to be

I have been reading all the posts about the Blogher conference in Chicago last weekend. I live in the suburbs of Chicago bit still would not have even considered going, I am wa-a-a-y-y too new to blogging. I am still feeling my way around and getting to know people and finding other blogs I like to read. But it has been especially enjoyable to read the posts about this year's conference.

I have been delighted to read about all the girl crushes out there, one blogger for another, based on the relationships they share online and admiration for the skills of others. Or maybe they just want to steal someone else's life, I don't know. So much humor - my gosh I think I have laughed out loud at most of the posts - especially the near universal "privacy to poop" issues several ladies talked about. *giggle* Who designs a hotel with beautiful bathrooms with louvered doors and shutters that open into bedrooms!!?!? What kind of a bad idea was that?! Everybody knows guys wouldn't care, but women? Especially women who don't know each other very well but want to impress all their girl/blog/crushes? Puh-lease!

I will admit to some envy though, I really haven't had many close relationships with women for many years, which is a story unto itself. The friendships built online between some of these ladies sounds amazing and omg so much fun!

Alas, I guess it isn't meant to be for me though. I registered at Blogher. I did. But I can't get in to save my life. I have 18 different usernames and passwords at work alone, not to mention the 104 (approximately) I have here at home - I thought well - I forgot my username. Or maybe it's my password. Maybe it's both! Hey - I'm only an I.T. employee! I requested a new password. Twice. I got a link back - twice, which I think confirms that Blogher recognizes me as existing! Yay! But I still could not get in. :(

I typed a poor-me missive to the powers that be - or the powers that I think - be - but have not heard back. I'm thinking they are looking at it saying omg can you believe her? Should we let her back in? Should we put her through a hazing first - some kind of initiation like forcing her to blog about her most embarrassing moments - and then reading it out loud to all her co-workers??? *snort! guffaw!!* Or maybe poop in a bathroom with shutters open to a roomful of fellow bloggers? No, that would be punishment for them!

Okay ladies - I'm ready, give me my assignment. I am just warning you now though, that if you make me drink alcohol before I blog - I tend to be a real lightweight and have been known to drunk-email and *gasp!* NOT use spellcheck! For real! So give me your best shot! I'm waiting!!