This Reminds Me How Blessed I Really Am

Tara is a young mother of four, whose husband, Mike, is in the Army. Their youngest son, Isaac, has been diagnosed as autistic.  I don’t know Tara personally–she was looking for another person with the same name as mine on Facebook, we started chatting, and reading each other’s blogs.  Her story is amazing–you can read what she has to say at Red, Green, Lellow.  Tara spends a great deal of her time fighting for her son–first to get a diagnosis, now to get treatment and help for him so that he can return to a normal life. I sincerely hope that her efforts pay off and that he will be a healthy, happy, normal little boy again.

In the mean time, Tara’s husband is being deployed somewhere again.  I don’t really know where or for how long, but this means that she will be by herself again with four children until he comes back. They are planning a ONE DAY “vacation to Virginia Beach before he goes away. I would like to see them be able to go for two or three days, and for them to be able to take the children to see some of the wonderful sites in that area, like the Virginia Aquarium .

I am so interested in her story, I guess, because it is one that is repeated so much here in the United States. Our health care system is NOT the best in the world. Even if you have insurance, like Mike and Tara do, that does not guarantee that you will get the health care or services you need and deserve for your family. Tara has had to fight tooth and nail every step of the way. It shouldn’t be so darn hard.  Can you imagine how much harder  it would be with no insurance? I surely can’t, but there are many many people just like Tara and her family, who have struggles like this every day, who do not have insurance to help pay for it, who get nowhere in their struggles.

Tara has no idea I am doing this, but if you would like to make a donation via paypal, to help they have a much needed few days at the beach, send me an email or make a comment and I will send you her paypal address. Let’s make this a great trip for this little family that is trying so hard.

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Not Much Going On

Another week gone by, and I have nothing much going on. I still have stuff to upload to the Etsy store, but haven’t had time to get it done. No sewing accomplished this week, either. I worked the late shift, so by the time I got home every evening this week, I was just plain pooped. All I wanted to do was eat my dinner and take a shower, then put my feet up.

Today we were off, and FabGrandpa suggested that we go to breakfast at the lodge. He didn’t have to ask me twice. The lodge was built in 1928. It has massive beams in the ceiling, and lots of windows that provide great views of the canyon. We didn’t get there until 9:00 a.m, so it wasn’t very crowded. We got a seat by a window, so I was able to get some good pictures.

My breakfast was two eggs over medium, hashbrowns, and bacon. Lots of coffee, too. I could have ordered a fruit plate, or huevos rancheros, or even gluten free pancakes. What I got looked and tasted pretty good.

After we ate, we went out on the patio to take some pictures. Yes, I already have tons of photos of the canyon, but it looks different every day, in different light.

Fabgrandpa took my picture.  Yes, I was posing.

Then I took his picture, too.

While we were out there, we saw my co-worker out roving. They gave us all pedometers this week–it’s a health and safety “initiative”, designed to get us moving and walking more. So, Richard was out walking the Transept Trail.

We went back home, and did all the grunt work–changed the sheets on the bed, turned the mattress, swept all the floors, shook out all the rugs. Then I cleaned out all the kitchen cabinets and straightened them up, cleaned out the refrigerator, and took out the trash.  Yes, everyday life, only at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

We decided to cook out on the new barbecue grill for dinner. I had a whole chicken that needed cooking, so I cut it in half, put on the seasonings, and threw it on the grill. An hour later, it was delicious. I made some oven roasted potatoes with garlic to go with, and our friend, Terry, brought a three bean salad.

Yum, a great dinner, then a beautiful sunset. We sat out there at the picnic table until the stars came out.

Life is truly grand!

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Moving Is Such Hard Work!

When my children were growing up, we moved 17 times in 5 years. I was a divorced mother of three trying to make ends meet. A lot of the time, that meant moving to a cheaper place, or moving in with friends for a while. We learned to pack up quickly and how to load the car (No, I didn’t have a truck) so that we could make the least number of trips possible to get the job done. Sometimes I did all myself, and sometimes I had help. It was always easier with help.

Moving my blog from Blogspot to a hosted website has been a HUGE job. And don’t think I have done it all myself. I don’t know enough to do it all by myself. To start off, Gayla from MomGadget has given me great encouragement. We “met” through the internet a couple of years ago. She was one of six women who were blogging on a group site called “Seven Babes A Blogging”, which is now defunct. They had one guest blogger each month, hence the Seven in the name. I was the guest blogger over there for the month of December, 2007. Just the fact that they let me blog with them was a huge encouragement to me, as I felt like I was playing with the big girls by doing that.

Then in November of 2009, I ran into her again, (online, of course) when she was looking for writers at MomGadget. I signed up and, and that sort of opened the door for me to ask her some questions, and before you know it, we were getting FabGrandma.com built. Gayla gave me advice on how to go about purchasing a domain name and how to get it hosted (I had no idea where to start). She installed my blog and Studio Press Lifestyle Theme you see here (the theme is the how the blog looks to you, purty, huh?). And she did it all in about two days. I was soooo impressed with her service. Thank you so much, Gayla.

After Gayla got through with the initial software installation and configuration for me, FabGrandma.com was all ready for me to move in. So, I got here, and I couldn’t believe how much room I have over here! At the old site, I only had one “room”, much like living in my travel trailer. There was only so much I could do over there. Not that I need a mansion, you know, I just wanted more room to move around, more places to store my ideas. And boy do I have that here! Just look at all those pages and linky things! But, it still had some “decorating” and remodeling to do. And I had no clue what to do or where to start!

It’s not that I didn’t know what I wanted. Oh, no! I have been thinking about and planning my new website for a couple of years. I knew EXACTLY what I wanted it to look like and what I wanted it to do. I just didn’t know how to do it. So, the next step was to just start. I worked on it for almost a week, many hours a day (good thing I am unemployed right now.) And I got it looking more and more like I wanted it to. All that work involved teaching myself some basic html, from HTML Basic. It’s like trying to learn German a phrase at a time.

At the end of the week, I was at a place where I had gone as far as I could go, but it still didn’t look like I wanted it to look. As I was sitting here wondering what the heck I was going to do about it, I remember a young man I had “met” online a couple of years ago. Brandon lives with his lovely wife in North Carolina. He has been reading my blog for a while, and has corresponded with me on several occasions because he is interested in the fulltime RV’er lifestyle. I emailed him and offered to pay him to do some work for me on here, with a list of what I needed done, and asked him how much he would charge me to do the work. I knew from reading his blog that he was looking for a way to earn some extra money, and I wanted to help.

Imagine my surprise when he emailed me back, and said that someone had done him a kind deed recently, and he would do this thing for me as a “pay it forward” kind of thing. What a nice guy! And thank you, Brandon, because the work you did was exactly what I needed done. You should go into the web design business.

So, here it is, brand spanking new! I think the majority of the work is done. I am just giddy with excitement. Take the grand tour and let me know what you think!

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What A Great Day!

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Company Comes To The North Rim

Dennis’s company left the following Monday. Today, Dennis came over with a bunch of bananas. He said one of his visitors left them at his place. So, I thought, when life hands you bananas, make banana pudding!

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Trying To Catch Up…

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