More Rain...!

I swear I'm getting sick of it raining here, the night of the 15^th it rained from approximately 16:15 to 2:20 am the next morning, and most of the night it was loud nasty lightning and thunder. Let me tell you if you have nocturnal astraphobia (fear of thunderstorms at night, I hope I spelled it right), and you are in a tent and a wicked thunderstorm comes through; you aren't sleeping. I happen to have that particular phobia, and thought I had almost beaten it till that night; the bad part was that by the time the lightning was getting bad it was raining too much to go out and into the car. So I spent a verrrrry long night unable to sleep cringing at every bolt of lightning and thunderclap. I wager if my girls had been awake they would have had a good view of the storm as they were in the car that night. Seeing as how the dogs had gotten their bedding all wet. My son slept through it, the dogs and cats slept through it aside from random playing of course. Even Silver slept through it, 'cept of course when I'd jump half out of my skin with the larger thunders or lightning strikes. I was able to finally get to sleep at about 2:30 am and get a few hours sleep before getting up at 6am to get the kids moving for school.

One of the biggest joys of “living” outside, is cooking outside. When it's raining you tend to eat more junk food as you can't cook anything, now we have the cooking area covered right now; but that only stops rain coming straight down. Part of the problem with that is our deep fryer doesn't have a sealed lip on it so when it rains hard we lose any frying oil in it. Silver is thinking of buying something to put the oil in between uses just to slow it down. Oh speaking of fryer oil we found at Wal-Mart the other day a 2.5 gallon bottle of peanut oil in a restaurant styled bottle (those heavy duty bottles in the boxes), those bottles make good water bottles after they are empty and washed out. Another fun part about your cooking space outside is you cabinets (if you are using any) won't stay clean. We have a nice metal cabinet with a wooden top on it, unfortunately it is painted white... so... needless to say it's looking very dingy right now. Also the wooden top is not going to be useable when we get inside the “Bunk House”, we will have to replace the top when we move it in. Same with my metal computer desk that has a vinyl press board top, that will need to be replaced. Something good that also happened when we went shopping the other day. We started going to the discount groceries out here and one of the two we went to gave us a crate of half pint vanilla shakes for free, they are sitting in our freezer now and we are taking out a few at a time to thaw and drink. The only thing she asked of us is to return the crate to her when we come back by the store, they are still good; she just needed the space in the cooler for another product. I think we were lucky that day.

For those of you who saw those picture of my stroke kitty Crookshanks when he was a kitten I will put us some more of him soon, he has grown into a very handsome young cat; though his head is still slightly crooked. We think he might grow to be larger than his father is, he is already the same size as his father and he isn't a full year old yet.

I'm not sure I mentioned it, but Silver has become healthier since we have moved here. First, before we moved here he was wearing a size 42 pants and now he is down to a 36. Next about 3-6 months before we moved here he was put on insulin, he is a type II diabetic; and besides the insulin he was taking two Glyburide and one Metemorphin (not sure on those spellings) pills twice a day and barely in control of his blood sugar levels. Now if he takes one of the Glyburide's his blood sugar drops below 60 and 90-100 is considered normal... 85 and under are not good. This was all before I started him on vitamin and mineral supplements, with this he has also pretty much stopped drinking coffee and picked up tea drinking instead. If we go out somewhere he might get one cup, but when I first met him he was drinking 3 pots of coffee a day.