We finally have a bedroom door! When we moved in here, our room had no door, but we figured that would be no big deal until we could get one for it. Well, our friend Rick had one for us pretty much within a couple of weeks of moving & Troy hung it, but it was too narrow for the doorway, and we had no idea how to fix it and had to wait for Rick to have time to help us.

The cats had a bad habit of starting to make a lot of noise starting at about 4:30am, trying to get us to get up & feed them. Now, I may have ended up getting up many mornings at that time, because I knew they’d never let me get back to sleep, but I never fed them then. I was trying very hard not to encourage the behavior, but they never stopped trying & I kept losing sleep & getting more & more forgetful and grouchy. I pretty much begged Rick to take some time yesterday & help Troy get my door up & he did. They finished at 9:00pm & we slept in this morning, pretty much for the 2nd time since we’ve lived here. Troy came out at 9, shocked that it was so late. Now at least I know I can stay up late if I want to & still be able to get enough rest because I won’t be up at 5am anymore, unless I really want to be.

Well, I’d better stop wasting time on here, I have a lot to get done in the next few days & Dave will be here Friday! Woot!

We had a really good time camping this past weekend. Friday night we were really cold, because our sleeping bags are basically crap, but we borrowed a much warmer one on Saturday night & slept great. I’m tired today, but then, it always takes me a few days to recover from anything out of our norm anyway. I’ll be wiped out all of July following our renaissance faire.

Ryan brought his mom’s trailer up & it convinced us that we really need to get our RV fixed or to start looking for used rvs for sale, it was sure nice to go inside, out of the cold & hang out on a real seat for awhile and have access to a stove. I’m going to see if my dad will help us tow ours into town so we can work on it more easily & hopefully get it up & running soon. I’m really excited about the thought again, we haven’t thought much about it lately, but I’d love to be able to use it.

We did a lot of thinking about the direction of our little circle, and there are some changes we’ll probably be making soon. I need to talk to Dawn & see what she thinks about it, since we don’t make those decisions alone, but I think she agrees.

Everything for camping is just about packed & ready, I just need to grab the cold items, toothpaste (and other stuff we’ll use in the morning), mead & my shoes. I need to print off our rituals, put them in the circle BOS & pack that, too. I’m prepared for just about any type of weather (note to self: grab your coat on the way out!), and have enough clothing to make sure I can change if anything happens to whatever I’m wearing. too. Yes, I overpack, even for a camping trip, but I don’t want to be unprepared if the weather turns bad.

In the time since I started writing this I got all of my ritual prep work done, and everything is printed & here it needs to be to go out to the car when Troy gets home. Now I just need to weed through my email & see what’s important before I go. I wonder who all of these people ho email me think I am, because they all want to sell me expensive shows & designer ties, and really, I’m someone who goes camping and does renne faires, I have no use for any of that, you know?

This week has been nonstop go-go-go from Sunday on. We got up Sunday morning, went & got the car inspected at 10, ran out to my folks’ house & picked up my dad’s truck, met Dawn & Jason at Home Depot and spent the next 2-3 hours buying everything we needed for our renne faire encampment. We spent the rest of that day either putting stuff together or going back & forth to get things we forgot, came home with Dawn & watched “True Blood” then we went to Charley & Vicki’s for a Father’s Day/Dawn’s birthday dinner & hung out there until 10.

Monday, we got up early, got the car registered, went to a faire meeting and then we went back to Dawn’s house. The guys started back to work on the encampment stuff & we went & took faire flyers all over town, stopped and bought some supplies & a dress for me to wear during the Royal Procession & came back. We painted, went back & forth to stores, worked and so on. Tuesday was the same, really, but we were done painting the main color by then & I drew on all of the lines to mark the beams that I’d tape & paint the next day.

Today, we went & got the pie & cake donations for faire & went straight to Dawn’s so I could do the taping. I ran out of tape, so Troy & I went & got some more, then I finished that up & we started painting. We were actually finished & back home by 2 or 3. Now we just have a few things to complete during setup & set up will be pretty straightforward & quick really. I think our encampment is going to look fantastic this year, really. I’m excited to get everything together & start taking pictures. I’m proud of the four of us, we took a little idea back in January & turned it into reality this week.

In other thoughts, are you like me & have promotional pens from places you never frequent? I have them from banks I’ve never even been inside, so I know I didn’t take them while I was banking, so where do they all come from? Do I walk away with them during faire meetings? The grocery store? Where?

I’ve been on an “Outdoor Room” kick this week, dreaming about what I can or wish I could do with my own yard. I’d love to turn the gazebo area into a super nice outdoor living space, where we could relax & hang out in the evening. It’s so nice & private back there & after the sun starts to go down, it’s shay & cool, too. I do have ideas for the walls, and we can replace the roof, if we ever gt around to it. We probably will, right before summer’s over, that seems to be the way we work most of the time.

At least we don’t have a spa, right? We get around to buying spa covers in the middle of winter, long after it was ruined. I’m not sure when we became such fantastic procrastinators, but we did. I’d like to stop, but I’m not sure how you do that. I guess making a list & setting a deadline on it would help, maybe I ought to start doing that. I did with the vegetable garden (which appears to be dying) and it got done right when I said it had to, so that worked for us. I really need to finish up in here & get my gardens watered for the night, too, at least before we go grocery shopping & I’m too tired.

I’m not a great gift buyer, I’ve discovered. I’m very good when I really know a person, it makes it so easy for me, but honestly, that field is pretty narrow. It includes Troy & my other best friends, everyone else, I’m pretty clueless about. It seems like everyone comes to me for ideas on what to buy for everyone else, though, and sometimes I do pretty well with them & others I just can’t come up with anything at all.

I always thought it was probably a blessing in disguise that I never had a huge wedding because I would have been searching for great bridesmaid gifts for months & probably would have failed miserably at it. Mostly, I think, because they should be matching & I’d feel like that didn’t capture each persons’ tastes and I really wouldn’t like that, so I’d keep trying to find the perfect thing that all of them would love equally.

I would have driven myself crazy with it in the end, I’m 100% sure of that. Anyway, I’m a lot more tired than I thought I was when I sat down to write this, so I think I’m heading for bed.

My niece decided to apologize the other day, I guess she took a few days to cool down & realize that treated me like that was wrong. Of course, I accepted it immediately. There are times when I feel like I’ve been one of the only stabilizing influences on her life, well Troy & I, and that the only other ones have been my parents, which is sad.

She wrote to me the other day, telling me she couldn’t live that way anymore, that the smoke, alcohol, chaos & lack of food was too much for her. She’s supposed to be going to see a therapist through CPS & plans to tell them everything that’s going on in her home, but her mother won’t make the appointment for her (our theory is that she’s afraid of what will come out). My mom has told her to get the phone number & make the appointment herself. She’s really hoping to get removed from her home & she’s asked if she can live here. We don’t really have room, but I’ll be damned if I let her go to foster care. So, I guess we’ll see what happens in the next few weeks. My office in here may become a bedroom for a 13 year old, at least for awhile.

I’m pretty sure the niece unit is still mad at me, but I think I’ve reached the point that I just don’t care anymore. I realized last night that I really don’t know her, and that really, she has a different face for each occasion & person in her life. I got too close & the hatred spilled over & I can’t do that again, I lived through years of bi-polar induced hatred with Rhi. I just can’t. I’m not THAT into a relationship with her. It may sound cold, but those years with Rhi drove me to the edge of suicide many times & I can’t afford to feel that way again, not now, when we’re finally getting our lives together after so long.

I did what I felt I needed to, I ended the notes going back & forth & took her off of my friends’ list, so that way, I won’t see what she’s doing & saying & I won’t feel like I did to be her parent, after all, she has her own set. No one helped us raise ours, unless I asked, and so far, that hasn’t happened, so I’m backing away. If she needs me to bail her out of another argument with her mom, she’s going to find me too busy reading hydroxycut reviews to get involved.

Well, I’m off to cut fabric panels for my booth walls & watch TV.

Just when all of your kids reach adulthood & you aren’t dealing with teen drama anymore, what happens? Someone else’s kid turns 13 & causes drama in your life. It started earlier in the week when my niece came up here, crying her eyes out, telling me some crap story about how her mom did this or that & “all” she did was call her a bitch. She was very forthright about the fact that she was told she couldn’t leave the house & did anyway.

So, about 20 minutes later, her mom comes up, tells me that she’s grounded from the internet & so I point her in the direction of where my niece is. They get into another argument, the niece refuses to come home & her mom storms out angrily.

My brother comes up 10 minutes after that. He tells me she needs to come home, so I tell her. She blatantly lies to him, saying that he mom said it was okay for her to come up here (contradicting what she told me). He calls her on it & the three of us try to figure out different strategies that screaming at her parents & calling them names & they leave. Well, she’s been mad at me all week, judging from the fact that she’s barely chatted with me at all.

Tonight, she posts a status on Facebook that says “RIP Norman Day!” (which is our last name) and when I ask her who that is, I get an obscure “someone” from her. Well, it sounds like to me, she’s trying to get sympathy from all of her little FB friends by making it sound like her grandpa died or something (and that’s MY dad & he’s quite well, thank you!) so I got a little steamed & told her to stop playing around & making people think someone died & it turns out it was some guy that died in the Korean conflict (except his name isn’t in any of the databases, so who knows?). So, she cops a major attitude with me, disrespects me all over her wall & I’m supposed to just sit here and take it. Well, I didn’t & I told her not to be running up here when she gets in a fight with her folks anymore, so now I’ve “disowned” her.

I just want to go back to the tween years, when she wanted to know the best acne treatment, and come & hang out at faire. I don’t like this version of her very much & that makes me very sad.

Troy just started another work week & that puts us another week closer to faire. Dave texted me this afternoon with his flight information, he’ll be here the 2nd of July & is going home on the 18th, so we’ll have him for more than 2 weeks, which will be nice. We plan to head up on the mountain for the 4th, just to get away & enjoy some quiet time before faire week. We won’t get to enjoy the celebration in town on the 5th, we’ll be too busy trying to get what we can done, while the Elks lodge takes over the park (they don’t EVER celebrate the 4th or Halloween on a Sunday here). We won’t even be able to start anything until they get the park cleaned up, so we’ll be behind during the entirety of setup.

In other stuff, I’m just hanging out at home for the next two weekends, trying to get caught up on life. Just keeping things watered is enough to wear me out, I swear. I need to be out in the back watering strawberries, flowers & peas, but here I am, on the internet, looking at reviews for nuphedragen, and trying to find a purse organizer pattern. I’m so motivated. Not.

I guess I’ll go do that, Tiny’s out back, she’ll enjoy playing in the water.