The Original Firewater's blog: "Life"

Wow.....I just received a message from a girl on my MySpace account and it brought tears to my eyes. I have been corresponding with this girl for about 3 years now. She was sixteen when she first asked to be added to my friend list, because she saw that I liked Phantom of the Opera. So, I added her. Little did I know at the time, the effect that I would have on this girl's life. The first situation, was when I recognized the symptoms of depression in her and encouraged her to seek treatment when she was having thoughts of suicide. Somehow, her parent's failed to see the symptoms. There were several other times, when she would contact me asking for advice and still there were many other times when she received it unsolicited. I did not know that this girl's mother had walked out of her life. In fact, I did not know this until tonight when I received a very sad, yet touching message, thanking me for being there for her. She told me that I have been more of a mother to her than her own mother. It brought tears to my eyes to think of the pain and loss that this girl has experienced in her life. I could relate all too well. The relationship with my own mother has been one of emotional abandonment and neglect through the years. Once again, I see the beauty of facing our adversities in life, so that we may give back to others what we have learned. I believe that there are no mistakes in life. God puts us where he needs us most and in doing so, we come full circle in facing our own challenges in life. It never ceases to amaze me, that even with all of the drama that is found over the internet, still so much good takes place. We are able to reach out and touch lives that we would not have been able to touch otherwise. I too have had my life touched many times over the years, by using the internet. One of the most touching experiences as a parent, was when Pee Jay lost her daughter. I had been wallowing in self pity, because my son had returned home from Iraq with post traumatic stress syndrome. He was very difficult to deal with and it was such a stressful time for me. Then there was Pee Jay.....who would have given anything to be experiencing the one thing that I was so selfishly annoyed by. I realized in that moment, just how blessed I really was. I received my child home alive when so many mother's did not. This experience was touching for both Pee Jay and I. She touched my life and I hope that I was able to touch hers in return. Angels here on earth....just when we need them most. It's amazing how that works, because we never really think of ourselves as angels, yet God has a way of using us to touch the lives of others when they need it most.....in return our lives are touched also.

Instructions...... Once you have been tagged, you have to write a blog with 10 weird or random things, facts, or habits about yourself. At the end, you choose at least 5 people to be tagged, listing their names . Don't forget to leave a comment that says, "You're it!" on their profile and ask them to read your blog. You can't tag the person who tagged you. 1. I hate the city. 2. I love to fish. 3. I sleep with my parrot at night. (Hey, he's old...50+ years old and has been with me a very long time! If you can sleep with your dogs/cats, well then why would my pet be so unusual to sleep with? LOL!!) 4. I have rheumatoid arthrits. It's an autoimmune disease that runs in my family. My grandmother died from it. 5. My favorite color is red. 6. I have a bleeding heart for animals and often prefer their company over humans usually. They love unconditionally and humans do not. We can learn a lot from our pets. 7. My favortie aniamls are birds....hey at least my pets can talk back when I talk to them! 8. I have been very intuitive all of my life and have had visions of things that will happen before they ever do. My father and daughter also have this. 9. I was in my 30's and married with 3 of my own and 2 step children before I ever went to college. (Late bloomer...what can I say?) 10. I do NOT enjoy shopping and will avoid it as much as I can. I'm not going to list names, but I will tag 5 people. If you want to play along, great....if not, no problem. It was all done in fun!

Several months ago, I had decided that I was tired of being a redhead, so I colored my hair dark brown. It didn't work....the red seeped back out within days and I was a redhead again. I decided to go a shade darker with the hope that the red would not seep through again..... (This was my FIRST mistake!) The box said...."Darkest BROWN!" (Yeah, right!) It was now super bowl Sunday....everyone was meeting at Bubba's for the game. I had purchased the hair dye several days prior, but never got around to coloring my hair, because I have not been feeling very well. I decided that I would real quickly color my hair that morning, before getting ready to go to Bubba's. (This was my SECOND mistake!) Now since I was coloring my hair dark brown, I decided that it was only right to color the eye brows to match.... (This was my THIRD and WORST mistake!) Up until this point....my worst hair trauma was when I had colored my hair one time and it turned out to look more like cherry cola. Oh this was so MUCH worse!! Although the box said "Dark BROWN" it was far from it. It was Elvira "BLACK!!" And I do mean VERY Elvira BLACK!!! (Oh, it gets better) When I colored my hair and eye brows....the coloring stained my skin BLACK!! A "VERY" resistant black at that! My eyebrows were now BLACK and I had a good quarter inch racing stripe above each of my EFFIN eyes of stained black skin! I thought....no problem, rubbing alcohol always lifts the dye out of your skin in times like this......Huh, uh! No..... I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.....NO such luck! Desperate people, do desperate things.....I grabbed the bleach! I again rubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and rubbed! Thank God it was finally starting to come off! (Somewhat) I was forced to use cover up to hide the remainder of my ignorance. Howerver, this still leaves the problem of having Elvira BLACK hair! I am now praying to God that the red seeps back out again! Damn it! Damn it all to hell! Mommy is a "Chola!" :( For those of you that do not know what that is.....Google it! LOL!!

Check out my buddy Stewie Griffin. He has a wonderful page with lots of games, live stream TV, etc... Be sure to rate, fan and add him and check out all of his blogs once you have been added. He's a great guy and a wonderful friend! '~SEXY~' StewieGriffin - Rate / Fan / Add Please!!!

@ fubar

So many times I put things off thinking that I'll get to them when I feel ready. I never use to be this way. Procrastination was not something that I have been known for until lately. Here I sit in the eleventh hour with trick or treaters just hours away from my doorstep and still I have not finished carving the pumpkins. I use to enjoy the yearly task of carving pumpkins. In fact, when I still lived in Portland, I would pick up about 8-12 extra pumpkins and carve them for my parents, so that they could line their driveway with them on Halloween. I now find carving pumpkins to be a not so enjoyable task. Perhaps, it was the enjoyment of having my children at home and sharing in the yearly festivities with them that made the task so much more enjoyable. Every year the kids and I would go to the pumpkin patch and spend hours picking out the perfect pumpkins. We would then take a hayride and drink the freshly pressed hot apple cider that Wilhelm's Farm made every year and would serve to their customers. The barn was filled with decorations that were scenes from fairytales and each scene was created with various ways of using pumpkins. Every year the scenes were different. There were farm animals to visit and pony rides for the children. It was always such a special time. I use to come alive this time of year as fall has always been my favorite time of year. I would bask in the festivites. Every year I would decorate my porch with bails of hay, scary scenes, pumpkins and music to set the mood. It all seems to have escaped me over the past few years. Each year I seem to do a little less than the year before. I finally broke down and put a few Halloween decorations up last night. It took me all of about five minutes to pull them out of the attic, so it's not like it was a huge task to do. I have not decorated the front porch. I will be lucky to have pumkins out there by the time that the children arrive. Yet here I sit blogging about the task that still needs to be finished. I finally broke down this morning and set things up in the kitchen to get these babies carved. I have managed to clean one pumpkin, but I have yet to carve it. The other pumpkin remains untouched at the moment. I know that I must complete this task and yet I am still putting it off. Every year my pumpkins serve as a dual purpose. I scrape the meat from the inside prior to carving them and boil it down and freeze it to use for my pumpkin pies over the holiday's. Scraping the meat from the inside of a pumpkin can be quite the work out. I try to take as much meat from the pumpkin as possible while still leaving it carvable. Speaking of carvable.....they are not going to carve themselves, so I have better stop writing about this and get the task done! NOTE: To those of you that have procrastinated like I have, I have a pumpkin technique that I will share with you. For those of you that have done the deed for this year, you may want to consider it for future reference. When cutting your pumpkin open, cut the hole from the bottom. This makes it easier to just slip a candle under it and the pumpkin is much easier to handle. Happy Halloween everyone!

What a treat...I just sat and watched the lunar eclipse. I live in a rural area, so it's dark enough to have had a great view of it. There are a gazillion stars out tonight that fill the sky. It kind of made me feel overwhelmingly small and insignificant sitting there surrounded by it all. It was a spectacular beauty to see. I was graced even more by a shooting star half way through the show. I kind of felt like the little kid waiting for Christmas to come and then sitting there in complete awe over the gifts that surround the tree. This was a far greater gift to behold. The heavens were filled with absolute greatness. I wish that I had paid closer attention to these things when I was growing up. I can only imagine the many miracles that I missed along the way. I just feel very blessed to have taken in such a spectacular sight tonight.

It's hard to believe that another birthday has arrived so soon. Another year has come and passed. Each one seems to arrive faster than the last. If you had asked me twenty years ago where I thought that I would be at this stage in my life, this would be the furthest from my expectations. I really have no room to complain. Without a doubt, I have taken my share of hard knocks along the way, but the road has also come rich with blessings. Perhaps far more than I have ever deserved. Although this is not where I had planned to be at this stage in my life, I look back at the lessons that I have learned along the way and the many people that have graced my life and the accomplishments that I have made mentally, physically, financially and spiritually. They all are a part of the puzzle. Each piece as important as the other. Both the joy and the pain have played an important part in who I am today. I cannot imagine the person that I would have been, had I not taken the paths that brought me to where I am today. After all, I never could learn anything the easy way. At least I know that each and every one of the lessons that I learned from brought forth the knowledge that I truly earned. I've heard it said that ignorance is bliss, but I have to disagree. Only with time do we come to know oursleves. What I thought was true twenty years ago, is far from what I believe to be true today. Life changes our concepts and values. As I walk through life, one truth remains constant.....the older I get, the more I realize how little I really know. Just as life is ever changing, so is that young girl that once looked in the mirror and believed that she had all of the answers.

As I sit here with a bird on my shoulder that is stealing cantaloupe from my mouth and sticking it in my hair.....I am still as happy as I can be! I had another follow up appointment today at the Casey Eye Institute. It was all good news! The iritis has completely cleared up and my eye pressures were back to normal range! This has been a long struggle to get under control. Many of you may not know this, but I have an autoimmune disease. Actually, I have two of them, Lupus and Rheumatoid arthritis. My immune systen has turned against my own connective tissues. In laymans terms it means that my immune system attacks my soft tissues such as joints, muscles, eyes, lungs, etc... It began attacking my eyes a few years ago and I have had several episodes of iritis. Iritis is basically infammation in the eyes. It's very painful and is also the third leading cause of blindness. Some of the drugs that are used to suppress my immune system and also treat the iritis, can have adverse side effects. Mainly the use of steroids is given to severe cases of autoimmune disease. The steroids are also used in eye drops to help clear up the iritis. Both the oral and eye steroids had caused my eye pressures to go up severely. You may know this as glaucoma. Glaucoma can also cause blindness. I no longer have to do frequent visits to the Casey Eye Institute, because there are no more white cells showing up in my eyes which means that the iritis is now under control for the moment and my eye pressures have come down to a normal range. I imagine all of this is quite boring to you, but it is a huge mile marker in the course of my treatment and I could not be happier. I do not have to go back for another check up at CEI until a year from now! Now if we can just get the rest of this disease under control, I will be even more happy! :)

About a month ago, I was out drinking with the girls and went up to the bar to order all of us a round of blow jobs. This HOT little 33 year old asked me if I was going to do mine the right way....I then asked him, "Why, are volunteering?" Indeed he did. It was so much fun that I kept ordering them all night! LOL! That was one hell of a bar tab that night! Well he was out of town for a couple of weeks and called me when he got back to town and I met him out for drinks with a friend of mine. It's not like it was a love connection or anything, but it was some serious eye candy! :) Which leads me to last night........ My friend and I caught the shuttle out to the local bar after going to the rodeo across the river. Just as we pulled up in the shuttle, the hot little 33 year old was walking out the door to catch the shuttle back to town. I no sooner lock eyes with this guy and he grabs me, dips me back half way to the ground and plants a long, wet, tonsil hockey kiss on me! Now I might add that this was the first time the guy had EVER kissed me. Then.....he hops in the shuttle and leaves me with my bell ringing and seeing damn stars! (Not to mention, he started the engine and left me to idle!)LMAO!!! WTF was that all about!?! LOL!! I'm telling you, in my 45 years of life....not one man has EVER come close to leaving a more lasting impression with a first kiss! HOLY BUCKET!! I will have to say, that one will definitely go down in my book as "THE BEST KISS" yet! I still don't think you could slap the smile off my face today! PERMA GRIN!! :)