I Guess I Took a Hiatus

Hubby texted me a rainbow one crappy morning.

Life feels like it is moving at warp speed.

I may have already typed that once or twice before ... I will type it again in future posts, I am sure.

Time as a measurement is completely different now than it has ever been in my life. 

I am running the domestic marathon, now afterall!

So let us play catch-up.

It is rainy season and there have been some crappy days, but we get so many rainbows it is hard to stay a grouch! However I have spent much of these soggy days over the last twelve weeks worried. I have worried about my mother, my friends, and the goals of my little family. Instead of really doing much of anything productive about my worries, I have spent my evenings (that weren't related to the holidays) sipping winter brews, speeding through whole seasons of TV shows thanks to online streaming (Hello, Downton Abbey!) and ....oh wait. That's it. Drinking beer and watching TV. ;-) 

Well, since I last wrote about my mother, much has happened and her health issues are finally getting resolved. I didn't feel a need to write about it on this blog because I was sending emails to my closest friends to keep them updated and then my sister was keeping a journal on the Caring Bridge site. Ultimately, cirrhosis and other severe things like cancer were ruled out but the local specialists and medical community were taking SO GOSH DARN LONG to get anything done and in the meantime her ascites was increasingly threatening her quality of life. Finally, my sister and she went to The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the doctors there were able to act quickly and decisively. They gave her a transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt. (Say that three times fast! LOL.) This tube, placed between her portal and hepatic viens, will be there indefinitely to improve the flow of blood in and around her liver and stop the accumulation of fluid. (Here is a picture from U of Washinton.) She is in rest and recuperation mode now, doing physical therapy and slowly letting her body adjust to no longer having the fluid (and the toxins that came with it.) We will most likely never know what caused her ascites, but at least it has finally been treated! THANK THE HEAVENS FOR THE MAYO CLINIC.

I saw the same rainbow that Dan saw that morning.

As for my friends I have been worrying about, they are all doing fine but there were some health scares and some extremely unfortunate news for my lovelies who were in the process of adopting internationally. My heart has been especially heavy for them.

In light of those somber developments as well as our local mall shooting as well as the shooting that followed in Connecticut, I feel a little silly to worry about my own family and situation. We are doing fine. There are just changes in the making and some of those changes are taking longer than we thought. I'm trying not to be discouraged. I'm trying to be optimistic. I'm trying to throw my optimism out into the universe as much as possible!

My rainbow of optimism in the middle of all the worries is these two guys...

Photo text from hubby at the vet. Raine snoozed through the whole appointment.

Magnet fun.

Park time.

Photo text from hubby.

Another photo text from hubby. Good reminder.