Me in December: Things will calm down after Christmas!

Me in January: We need to coordinate our calendars better. We have too much going on. No free weekends! Who is agreeing to all this?

Last weekend we had a bed build with Sleep In Heavenly Peace, the organization we help with that provides beds for children in our town. Our last build was, to put it mildly, a disaster. Christopher called a team meeting, got out a dry erase board, and assigned all the board members as the boss of a specific area of the building process. He assigned me the headboard station. The organization’s model is that anyone in the community can come to a build and help make a bed. You don’t need experience with tools or saws to help out! Come one, come all! Turns out, you need experience drilling holes straight which I found out the VERY FRUSTRATING WAY. All my table had to do was drill straight through six spots on a 2×4 (4×8? 24×64?) then use another tool to make a 3/4 hole large enough for some type of socket. Or maybe it’s a screw. I don’t know. That wasn’t my assigned department. I understand the process and I’d done it before, but I could not do it that day. I had to keep asking for help and the help told me that to drill in a straight line, I needed to hold the drill straight. Thank you for that insight. I never would have considered such a novel idea. I won’t name names about who the help was, but I am legally and emotionally bound to him for life. Funnily enough, my table was called the Quality Contol table. There was nothing quality about the eight headboards I messed up and had to put in the redo pile. Eventually, I did what any good boss does and I passed the drilling job off to Takiyla who knows how to hold a drill straight.

Here we have my Quality Control table on the left. More quality work is happening because I was taking the picture instead of holding the drill.

In events I can better control the quality of, my friend asked me to help her organize a dress shop for Night to Shine. We collected donated formal/prom dresses and the girls at the school set up a shop where the ladies attending Night to Shine could come get a dress and jewelry for free. For most of them, it may be the only time they’d get to experience the “normal” experience of going to a dress shop and being waited on like that so we tried to make it special.  

We’ve had the cats for five years and visited the vet maybe four times in all those years. I called the vet three times this month alone. I’m bad enough about wondering if I’m overreacting when it comes to bringing AB to the doctor. I’m a million times worse when it comes to bringing a nonverbal animal to the vet. I know nothing about cats. I could bring them in for the human equivalent of a hangnail and be charged $200. Long and incredibly boring story short, I was told Lucy either has asthma or a hairball issue. As I said, I’m no vet but those seem quite different. I was given the option between an X-ray and steroid shot or a hairball cream from the pet store. I chose door number two for $17.50. I left with a stressed cat and a side of UTI antibiotics. Both cats are given that medication twice a day and it takes two of us to get the medicine in their mouths. We’re watching our friend’s kitten (who we’ve nicknamed Home Wrecker) this week and between the antibiotics and the forced living with Jack, Linus would choose door number one. He hates both options, but the 2lb fluff ball is the greater of two evils.