What a HUGE relief that my son and I are not having to go to trial over that accident he was in almost three years ago.  I'm so glad for my son that he doesn't have to tell the story any more if he so chooses.

The people suing us did get a minimal amount of money from our insurance company, though.  It's a sad state of affairs that even when everything says you are in the right people can get money from you.

The only one who really made out was the other attorney.

Here's a really sad part.  My attorney told me that the widow had legal action taken against her for her to pay back the $5,000 she borrowed for her husband's funeral.  That wasn't the worst part.  The entity that loaned her the money was a Catholic church!!!  Makes me sick!

Now that the trial is over I was able to reschedule my visit to my in-laws.  I cancelled my ticket when I found out that the trial was going to last so long.  God is GOOD!  Southwest Airlines extended their Internet special and I got the exact same flights for the exact same price!

My niece is having a wedding shower that I will be able to attend.  I am staying longer so I can take a mental break.  I can help my in-laws unpack as they will be moving into their new house just before I get there.  That's a no-brainer.  Plus, I will take my laptop and work on some things while I am there.

This Thursday I'm going to my mom's for a few days.  In the meantime I will be trying to catch up on my laundry and making sure I leave enough food here for my guys so they don't shrivel up and die of malnutrition.  Wouldn't that be sad?

We haven't had a good day for laundry in weeks.  The wind blew hard for five days in a row last week so I couldn't hang my clothes out.  Prior to that there was no sun.  The next day after the wind stopped the sun disappeared and it started to rain again.

I haven't used my dryer this much since since since... the beginning of time!  (No, I wasn't there.... I'm not THAT old!  It was a joke.  Really!  REALLY!)

Wow, right when I was typing that the sun came out.  So, I went to throw some clothes in the wash, hung the others that I had intended to stick in the dryer, helped my son wash the dogs in tomato sauce (they had a close encounter of the skunky kind), and totally got involved in other things.

When I finally remembered that I had started working on this and came back to my computer my son was online.  He was helping me to get my wireless network in order here at the house.  I was having trouble with the settings.  Now we are trying to enable my son to use the printer hooked to my computer.  So, that took a while and then it was evening and I ran out of time.

My other son, the one who is having trouble with Coast National Insurance found out that they will not pay any of his medical bills until his therapy is done and he signs something saying he doesn't need any more treatment.  He got a call from the regional vice president because of the letter we sent to the company's CEO.

At least one thing got accomplished.  They are finally paying my son the difference that they deducted in the value of his car due to the mileage.  They were trying to say his car had 100,000 more miles on in than any of the other cars of the same year and model with no evidence whatsoever!  It was crazy!  1969 VW Bugs only show five digits on the odometer.  The claims adjuster actually said, in writing, that they had to assume that a car over 30 years old had gone over 100,000 miles.  Yet, everyone my son spoke to at that company just didn't seem to understand that the other '69 VW's that they found were ALSO over 30 years old.  They all had it stuck in their silly little heads that his car had more mileage than those others.

I'd like to think that they are just not very smart as opposed to they work for a cruel company that continuously robs people of money to which they are legally entitled.  However, the more I see the more I think that they are just plain evil and are trying to force people into settling for less by causing financial distress.  So sad.  Fortunately for my son he has a family who is taking care of him while he has no income due to the accident.

I want to know why in the world would it take over five months and umpteen phone calls and letters for them to finally tell him that his bills are not getting paid?  Over and over the claims adjuster said she was paying his medical bills that same day.

In the meantime, my son's credit is going down the tubes because the bills are unpaid.  Well, today we will get them paid.  I am loaning him the money.  I finally got the check from my life insurance policy I cancelled.

Hmmmm, if someone representing a company tells lies over and over and nobody in the higher echelon of that company thinks it's a big deal... what kind of company is that?

(In April 2005 I put together a page about that insurance company to warn people.  I found out lots more information about them and they treat a lot of people horribly.  If you want the full story it is here.)

It has been a long time since I've had a cold sore and I have never had one like the one I have now.  It is on the inside of my lip.  Ow ow ow!  I keep putting medicine on it.  It is getting a little better, but not much.  I woke up in pain in the middle of the night when it had stuck to my other lip.  I guess the moral to the story is to not get cold sores.  Is there a form that I can sign saying I don't want any ever again?

I need to go see what I have on my "to-do" list for today.  I know it is a long one because I'm leaving in the morning.

While I'm gone my guys will have to coordinate their efforts for transportation.  My two sons have no cars right now.  I will take my truck and camper to my mom's leaving the three men with one vehicle.

My big truck won't fit into many parking lots so we end up having to schedule the use of the car.  When I am gone someone else will have to step up to the task of all the logistics.  It's not easy.

 I went out of town for a week and just ran out of time.  I tried to get things done so I could update this, but everything in the world started happening all at once.  As I usually do, I tried to leave my family with clean clothes, a clean house, and plenty of easy-to-fix food.  I needed to make sure they had all they needed to survive while I was gone.

As secretary of our homeowner association, I had things that had to get done before I left.

Then, the cable Internet was finally installed, two days before I left!  It was supposed to get installed about two weeks prior to that.  They had to put in a new cable to the house so it took them four different visits to figure that out even though when I first called I told them the old cable had been cut.  Did they believe me?  Nope.  They first sent me the hook-up guy that is only prepared to set up the modem and hook up the computer.

I told him what was needed.  He apparently didn't believe me until he checked to see if we were getting a signal.  Gee, no signal BECAUSE THE CABLE WAS CUT!  The next guy that showed up looked around and started to tell me they would tear out a part of my driveway to fix the cable.  Good grief!  I showed him how the cable went across the front of the lawn to the far end of the house and NOT under the driveway.

So, he left since he didn't have any equipment at all for laying new cable.  I'm not sure why he came.  The next guys that came were looking hard at my driveway next to the garage.  I went out and discovered they were thinking about tearing up my driveway, too!  So, once I straightened them out, they let me know that they didn't bring the equipment that they needed to dig to lay the new line.

However, they did have a few short-handled shovels.  They spent the rest of the day digging little holes.  They finally got a new cable hooked up.

So, once again, I waited for the next guy to find time to come out.  It turned out to be the first hook-up guy that came out.  However, he couldn't get it to work so he left and another guy came!

He got me up and running, but forgot to set up our email account.  So, I spent about an hour on the phone with another guy.  (In case you are wondering about getting cable Internet... it only took 8 men, 5 visits, and two phone calls.  Sheesh!)  Then I had to call to cancel our second phone line and to cancel AOL.  As you might imagine, I had to spend about an hour on the phone with AOL while they tried to convince me to not cancel my account!

Prior to my leaving, my son's waterbed sprung a leak and I had to drain it, dry it, buy a new mattress, and refill it.  I had to find him a new foam pad, too.  That took almost a whole day.

The day before I left I had ten errands to run.  I mapped out my route and stopped at ten different places and made it back home again in 2 1/2 hours!  My poor legs were tired because I made those little doggies walk fast!!

There were a bunch of other things that took every second of my time up until it ws time for me to leave.  I stayed up till after midnight the night before trying to get everything done.

Usually, when I am planning a trip I make a list of things I want to take.  I usually don't forget anything because I plan it far enough in advance.  Not this time!  I forgot all sorts of stuff!

My niece had a wedding shower last Saturday.  That was why I went.  My husband suggested I go because I usually don't get to do things like that.  He thought he was being nice and giving me a vacation.

I planned to stay a week so I could visit with her and with my in-laws who live nearby.  Well, my in-laws just happened to finish moving into their newly-built house the very day I arrived.  So, when I got there they had nothing unpacked.  All their important stuff was put into the basement and was stacked behind a whole bunch of other stuff.

There was one spoon and one bowl in the kitchen.  There was no shampoo, no food, no toilet paper, no anything else.  There I was, worn out from all the things I had done at home prior to leaving.

Since I was the healthiest one there I ended up carrying billions of boxes up the stairs and helped to unpack.  I helped re-arrange the furniture.  I was exhausted!  It was not at all the vacation I had imagined!!

I did get one thing accomplished.  I was able to clean up and back up my laptop.  I had way too many programs on it so I deleted everything I no longer used.  Then I organized and backed up all my stuff.  So, I freed up a lot of space and hope to free up a little more.  The bad part was the reason I got so much done was I had too much coffee one evening and couldn't sleep!  I was wide awake until 1:00AM.  Then, my mother-in-law woke up early and started putting things away in the kitchen at 4:00AM.  The kitchen cupboards were on the other side of the wall where I was sleeping.  (I'm not even going to mention how she had to get into the room where I was sleeping at 2:00AM and turn the lights on to find something.  Oops, I mentioned it.)

I worked on a few new web pages, too.  It was stuff that I've collected and just hadn't put together.  A couple things were additions to pages that are already there:
Let Go and Let God has something added at the very end
I added some things about Dying to Self.

There were a few other things, but they aren't quite yet ready.

So, Tuesday late afternoon I got home later than planned because of some airplane maintenance problems.  Yesterday I started updating this and found out I had problems with our new cable Internet.  Well, the problem was with my wireless networking system, not the actual Internet.  I plugged myself in via cable and sent my son, my computer expert, a "HELP" email.

Yesterday afternoon and evening he helped me figure out what was wrong.  Apparently the router needed to be reset but it took two tries to get it reset.  Once it was reset I had to get each computer configured to find the router.

In the meantime I was trying to fix my old computer that I used before my husband bought me the laptop.  I let my family use that one so they don't mess up my Clarion stuff with any viruses or whatever other bad things they might do.

Well, that computer has some serious problems so I was working on figuring out what was wrong.  Our Norton wouldn't update itself so I deleted it and downloaded the free security stuff our cable company offers.  It found three viruses.  Now I'm doing some maintenance and de-fragging and such, but it keeps freezing up.  So, I may have found another time-consuming project to keep me busy.

So, anyway, last night my son and I spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong with our wireless networking.  By the time it was done I had to go fix dinner.  Then I was too tired to think straight so this didn't get updated.

So, once again I have let you down.  I'm really sorry.  Every time I determine to not let anything interfere with this Bible study something happens it seems.  That is good in one way.  If the enemy is trying to distract me then that means I am accomplishing a good thing here.  So, here I am once again asking for your forgiveness.  Please don't write me off as a flake.  I am not a flake.  A crust, or a tidbit, or a fungus, maybe but definitely not a flake!  Please say you will forgive me!