Not so spiritual today

I have had lots of moments of talking with God (hopefully not out loud other than prayers with the kids), but this blog will be mostly the mundane stuff.

Jer is out of town on a church trip, so it's always funny to see what God throws at me while he's gone. Last night, after I managed to get the 50lb bag of dog food out of the trunk, I went to feed Howdy. 9:30ish, dark outside. As I walk onto my back porch, I hear a pretty significant skittering on the metal covering of the porch. We've been seeing lizards, and this one sounded big, so I was a little worried already. Imagine my level of panic that set in as I saw a RAT running down the brick of my fire place just 2 feet from where I stood. Now, I know there is wildlife in the outdoors, but A RAT ON MY BACK PORCH. Being calm and mature, I shuddered and quickly stepped backward. Well, Jer's grill cover was draped over the smoker and I heard scratching inside. I'm not sure what I was thinking or what possessed me, but I decided to shake it a little - 3 rats ran out, one almost over my foot. Yeah, I stayed calm and cool and SCREAMED LIKE THE WORLD WAS ENDING while flailing my arms. Where was my dog? Laughing at me, I'm sure from his dog house. He came out stretching and yawning after I screamed. This caused panic enough to phone my husband a few states away and tell him to come and fix it. He laughed and told me to go shake out the grill cover and put it on the grill. "What are you, crazy? Did you not hear what just happened?" He stifled (mostly) some laughing, made some comment about how he wished he could have seen it, and told me to get a bat and go after them. WHAT?! I was poised to get rat poison, but he made a good point that Howdy could eat it. So, this is proof, PROOF that we need that outdoor cat for the back yard that I've been talking about getting but couldn't really justify. That realization hit me today - so, I need a young kitten that doesn't know to be scared of dogs or has been around dogs, because I'm pretty sure that if the kitten doesn't run, Howdy won't do anything to him. Seriously, I want a kitty. Anyone hook me up?

So, I come home today, open the mail and see that the kids' college fund and both retirements seem to have taken significant losses last quarter. Not really surprising, but when you see that -$673 it just hurts. Especially on multiple accounts. Hmmm. Just money, right!?

So, to console myself, I turn to my computer to catch up on my blog reading (thank you Suzanne for Google Reader!). While I'm at it, I start to install the Norton software I purchased when I GOT THE FULL PHOTOSHOP for an insane (low) price. I pop the CD in, nothing. So, I go to the My Computer to open it manually, and it won't show my D: or E: drives (CD & DVD). Hm. So, I inserted probably 20 different CD and DVDs thinking, like an idiot, that the computer was going to say, "oh, sorry, I wasn't paying attention, that is the CD I needed to find the drive." Don't ask me how I do some of the things I do, but I found an error message in the Device Troubleshooter, tracked it to the internet, deleted some registry files (who knew those were in there?), reboot, BOOM, I have a CD & DVD burner again. Fabulous. So, I spent the day backing up data in case there was a problem in the Norton installation or some terrible virus had taken over the computer and corrupted all my files. Not so much, just a couple that it supposedly wiped clean! I'm still a little intimidated by the CS3, so it's still in a really cool box sitting by my computer. That should be a fun story for another day...

I ended my escapades with a trip to Zumba class at the Y. I had a sad realization tonight. There was one portion where Amy instructed us to jerk around like Elaine on Seinfeld for the part of our "dance" (usually it's some salsa, hip hop, or something cool that I can't quite get). I am proud to say, I can do "the Elaine." When I realized that, at first I felt bad about myself, but then I got into it a little more because, well, it just felt good! :)