O. W. IN G. S.

I noticed that nobody has posted here in a while, so I figured I'd pop in to explain. After our costly January, we were informed that I would be losing my job at the end of April. I spent the rest of February, March, and April working every hour possible to squirrel away as much as we could. The thought process was to try to make it through the time between jobs. Little did I know that there was no job in the area for me. The month of May gave way to June, which quickly became July. Before I knew, it was August, and I was still job hunting. I looked into the possibility of returning to school to finish what I'd started 18 years previous. I enrolled at the local Community College, and started classes in early September. Here we are in October, at midterms, (we are still on quarters until next year),and I am barely able to think. I came here to see what was going on from my wife's perspective, as we haven't had much time to converse with each other lately. I still don't know anything, but was at least able to, for the moment, relieve the stress of having to do schoolwork. I had two midterm exams today, with a paper, quiz, and another exam tomorrow. Maybe Brandi could tell you about our vehicular adventures in her next post, or maybe she will be trying to relieve her own stress as she plans to return to college as well. The storm is coming.....

I'm pretty sure there aren't many more appliances or machines that can break down. This month alone, we have replaced a sump pump, water heater, and two furnaces. Now, our van, the only vehicle we all fit in, is at the shop. We suspect the starter is bad. So, I think we'll just be done with repairs and replacements for a while. Thank you very much!

Jon, the boys, and I have been fighting off some type of cold or flu the last few days. The girls have been a little testy, but they haven't acquired the fever. I wasn't as bad off as Jon, so I've been the one to run the errands and get the girls to where they need to go. Hopefully, we are on the mend and no one else gets sick.

I was concerned that we might be getting behind on school days, since we took off a few unexpected sick days. So, today I checked our day counts and found that we had done enough extra days this year to make up for the missed days/hours. I can rest easy!