Life has been really crazy here, so bear with me. The first major mile stone in my life has happened, I'm officially 40. So why don't I feel old? Because age is simply the number of candles on the cake. If you feel old, you already have one foot in the grave. Not me, I have way too much living to do.

I'm now officially out of the USN. However, that is a temporary state of affairs. Turns out the Navy screwed up. I'd gotten out because A. I was sick of beating my head against a glass ceiling & not advancing, & B. My contract was up anyway. WELL, turns out I DID advance, back in February 2006!!!! However, my points got screwed up & never counted. SO, I have to come back into the active reserve, & send a package to DC to have that little issue corrected. Once I GET advanced, I just have to stay in long enough to hit my 20 & I can retire.

We've been hugely busy working on the house. The pool is officially open now, & the kids are loving it. We had a 19 x 14 addition put on the back of the house. It's a sunroom/lanai/whatever you want to call it. It's not quite done yet. They still have to come back in & install the heat/ac unit, & then we'll lay a double layer of padding, & install Pergo. it adds a little over 500 sq ft to the overall house living space. That brings to total sq footage of the house to 2510 or something.

The kids are all out of school. Paul has been promoted to 11th grade provisional(or so we told him) on his passing reading in summer school, which starts on Monday. Boring or not, which he claims it is, he's going. No summer school, no 11th grade, no driver's license, no playing soccer. Capeesh? Needless to say, after flying off the handle & getting into a HUGE fight with his Dad over it, & saying he was running away & not coming back, AND after we had him hauled back from his friend's house by the county sheriff, he saw things our way. Teenagers..... Sarah was promoted to 9th grade, so she's all excited because she's a high schooler now. Little does she realize that she was big girl on campus at the middle school, she's now right back to square one, & is low girl on the totem pole in high school, LOL. She who DETESTS math, & was failing algebra all year made a supreme effort & brought her grade up from an F to a B! We were very proud of her for it. Kyle will be repeating 3rd grade. He's very weak in reading, & they are also going to be testing him for possible learning disabilities. He's also going to summer school starting Monday. Ian sailed through first grade with straight A's, & hopefully will be a little more challenged in 2nd.

At the front of the house, there have also been some major changes. We got tagged by the home owner's association by the yard Nazi's for weeds. SO, we laid 800 feet of sod, added a flower bed around the lone tree in the front yard, laid out a new flower bed so I could plant more roses, (I'm a rose addict) & added 2 little quarter circle beds at the ends of the driveway. The griffins you see in the above photo are what's in the 1/4 circle beds. They are home & drive guardians

The sad note is that we lost a furry family member on June 4th. Tipper, one of our kitties, had been sick all her life. She had a heart condition, which caused a lot of her other medical problems. She passed away in her sleep, & we've buried her along the fence in the back. We are planning a small memory garden for her. She would have been 4 years old in December. We miss her gentle ways, but we're actually thankful that she spent that long with us.

On the rescue front, all is going about as normal. I've turned away more than I can count, in order to be able to care for the ones I currently have until they get adopted. I have 2 girls leaving this morning later for their new home together.

So far as total flukes go, we were struck by a random lightning hit on June 5th, Sarah's 14th birthday. She & I were out bathing suit shopping. If you LOVE horror, take a teenage girls shopping for clothes.....anyway, we get home, to be greeted AT the door, & told that your entire HOUSE is fried. Turns out the bolt hit about 6 FEET from the back door of the addition, traveled through the main ground wire & up into the house. Let's see, so far, we've had to replace the main circuit breaker & upgrade that to the tune of $600, add a surge suppressor to the cicuit breaker for another $100, replace the house phone for $30, replace the motherboard on my computer for another $250, plus I've lost my less than 6 months old 19 inch flat screen monitor, the 3 in 1 printer/scanner/copier, & BOTH of the kids' computers. Who KNOWS what they will cost to replace.

BUT, it COULD have been SO much worse! Things can be replaced, those we love can NOT.

I'm still having a major case of writer's block. I'm really hoping the Muse will come back from the apparently round the world in a million days vacation she didn't tell me she was taking sometime soon!