Jerrett and I both have November birthdays. His is the 12th and mine is the 28th. So it’s the time of year when family and friends send us crazy birthday cards and I thought I’d share a couple with you.

The above is a picture of a bunch of clowns - on the inside it says, “You can just tell we’re family” and then my sister Tory added, “I don’t see you and I in this photo, did we miss the call?” She’s a nut and I laughed so hard my sides hurt after reading it. It’s funny because I use a ‘circus freak’ analogy when talking about the hight difference between myself and the rest of my family - I’m over six feet tall - my dad and mom…they do good not to require peddle extensions in their cars. 

I remember when I was about 14, I got a card from my mom in the mail that had a picture of a big nose on the front of it - I thought to myself, “What in the heck!?” Then I opened it and I still remember what it said - and it’s words EVERYONE should live by. “You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friends nose” - truer words have never been printed. 

Which leads me to this jewel. When I saw it, I got a bit weepy. I don’t think we realize how quickly they grow and change - but it only took this card, personally created by my dad and step mom, for Jerrett’s 14th birthday this year:

See what I mean? Look at him. He is SO adorable! The first thing John said when he saw it was, “Wow, two belts, so this isn’t a new thing?” Jerrett is standing in the living room of my dad and step mom’s house, behind him on the floor is the train he would play with for hours and hours. It had smoke. Real live smoke. He thought it was the coolest thing ever. Of course, as every good ‘ole Texas boy should be, he’s wearing Wrangler jeans and I’d be willing to bet, that’s one of those crazy canvas shirts that were so popular back then. I don’t know. He looks so sweet and innocent

Anyway, so those are some of the cards from this year. I’ll post some more, as they come in I’m sure.

Here I sit, zombie-like and exhausted. What, you might be asking, possessed me to stay up all night on a ’school night’? Sick kid. It does it every time. It seems, every time we have plans, as a family, to go out of town or something similar, Jerrett gets real sick right before. I can only assume he does it because he’s worried himself sick - he tends to over-think things to the point of exhaustion and we all knows what happens then. At any rate, he’s crashed out on the couch right now and I am sitting here attempting to pull my head together enough to work on stuff that ain’t gonna wait, no matter who is sick. 

Also? I got the cutest birthday card from my sister in Florida - it’s funny and if I wasn’t so physically spent, I’d take the Christmas Cards off the scanner (and the Blockbuster movie, my sunglasses and some random business expenses receipts) and scan it for all to see…but, alas, I’m to tired to move…so maybe later. I also want to share Jerrett’s birthday card that my dad and stepmom sent. It is absolutely priceless! It’s a picture of Jerrett at about age 3 standing in their living room…he looks so darn cute!

Anyway now this just turning into randomness and it’s keeping me from doing the crap I need to be doing.

I write you tonight from Safari, because Firefox 3 has still not addressed the problem of the spell check on the fly problem with Wordpress. Until yesterday, I was blissfully using FF2 on my desktop machine, but I started getting some random wonkiness from one of my FF Add-Ons and when I went to see if there was a new version, I was instructed that I sucked for using FF2 and that if I wanted to use my really awesome add-on, I had to get FF3. Lame-O me forgot about the Wordpress issue and blindly downloaded FF3 - then came on over to post about my stupid face rash and realized I was not being spellchecked - and those of you who know me (meaning, those of you who talk to me on IM) know exactly how frightening that can be.

So, here we are in Safari - because the on-the-fly spellchecking in Safari actually works. Thank you Safari.

Ok, so a few things first, I have a few new favorite songs to share with you, so open your iTunes now and start downloading them.

• Relentless by Jason Aldean - Side note, this song is not only fantastic, he’s hawt. Married, but still hawt.
• Let It Go by Tim McGraw - This song is pretty deep and hits me right there, with regards to the topic we don’t discuss here.
• Love Story by Taylor Swift - She’s a really talented artist and wow her messages are often pretty deep.

Those are my weekend iTunes purchases - I am in the process of compiling a list of great songs I can listen to while driving to California in a few weeks. Oh, I also got the Blue Oyster Cult song that prompts people far and wide to demand “More Cowbell”.

Alright - now on to the ‘Ouch - My face hurts’ portion of tonight’s program. It seems that I might have gotten ahold of something on Saturday morning that caused a catastrophic allergic reaction - and by that, I mean my face puffed up like a puffer fish and my lips started to split open. Now, as I sit here, it feels like my face is going through that 24-hours-after-a-sunburn phase of healing. It feels dry, gross and it freakin hurts!

I ended up taking Benadryl Saturday night in order to try to curb the pain/swelling - I mean, after all, my anniversary was already shot all the heck. Right?

Anyway, I am doing a bit better today I think. My skin feels real rough around my chin and dry - wow, I am scared to open my mouth for fear it’ll crack something and I’ll have a Joker-like opening in place of my normal Brandy-sized mouth.

By the way, so far so good on the medical front - I have decided to change the tag name of the category that contains most of my medical stuff..:)

(I am listening to Relentless right now…Wow, this song moves me…I’m not sure why, but it does (It might be because he’s hawt tho - I will admit that))

I’ll check in later in the week - surely something will happen between now and then that will be blogworthy…I hope…

(I talked to my dad tonight too - which always makes me a little giddy - I miss my dad a lot)

I was sitting here trying to think of what I wanted to write about and I decided that I didn’t really *want* to write about anything specifically. I’m not feeling 100% which kinda makes me worry a bit, because of the new treatment plan I started this week. I’ve had a headache for three days…not something that’s a ton of fun, ya know?

I cooked dinner tonight and it was one of those OMGWHATAMIGOINGTOCOOKWEREALLGONNASTARVE type things…so we had ‘The Kitchen Sink’ for dinner - ground beef, two cans of diced tomatoes, a can of Ranch Style Beans, a box of Mac N Cheese and 2 other quarter filled boxes of random pasta. John said it was great - I’m not so sure. Something was missing and it just might have been the cornbread…but who knows?

So, how about that election? Huh? Talk about edge of your seat suspense the whole night! Jerrett had one of those ‘color the states’ maps for school - and I was telling them as the projections were coming in what color to color each state - we got all the way to the end and realized that some teacher decided to do switch the colors around and the “Blue States” were supposed to be colored red and the “Red States” were to be blue…what kind of craziness is that? I wrote a note and said I was morally opposed to coloring blue states red so we did it the correct way. No one wrote back. 

My dad had a wreck the other morning in Chico (Texas for you non-local folks) - he was sitting in the turn lane getting ready to turn into one of the crushers and a sleeping truck driver rear-ended him going 60 miles an hour. He actually hit him twice - once in the back of the trailer, which made his truck kind of jack-knife-y and then came back and hit him in the back of his tractor. Apparently it did a lot of damage, but I haven’t seen it. Dad is doing ok - they want to keep an eye out for his back pain, but otherwise, he’s ok. We chatted last night and he seemed in good spirits. 

My step-mom had knee replacement surgery last Monday and is doing ok. In fact, she was doing really well there for a while, but seems to have pushed it a bit hard and is now paying the price. I got her a really funny card today that will surely make her laugh! I’m gonna mail it out tomorrow.

John and I are celebrating our anniversary on Saturday - I know what I’m doing - I see to much gray when I look in the mirror, so I have an appointment at 1 to see Rachel. He, on the other hand, will lay around and play video games all weekend I am sure. 

We’ve finalized our plans for the Thanksgiving Holiday. We’re going to go out to Bakersfield to see John’s folks and hang out for a few days. I am looking forward to getting away, it’ll be nice. My birthday is the day after Thanksgiving, so we’ve decided to stay till Saturday - so we aren’t driving back on my birthday. Hopefully while we’re there, we’ll get to hang out with some of John’s close friends, who we always try to connect with any time we’re in close proximity to each other. 

Overall, that’s really it. We’re just hanging out and taking things easy.

I got a phone call yesterday from an actual real person who was calling to ask me if I supported Barack Obama - it was actually refreshing to hear an actual voice - which begs the question, is McCain using Robo-Calling because he can’t get actual real life people to make the phone calls? Things that make you go hmmm - especially in this decidedly republican state where McCain already holds the office of Senator. To date, 1 real life phone call from Obama’s camp - 6 Robo-Calls from McCain’s camp and/or his local political supporters asking me to support him.

One question, to all of you out there, do the calls really work? I wonder, because I can’t imagine some random (or live or robo) call prompting me to change my mind - I would like to think, at this juncture, minds aren’t being changed by listening to telephone propaganda. I could be wrong though.

The new glasses are pretty awesome. Friday night, I did have some minor headache-ish type stuff, but I think it was because I was relaxing my eye muscles, rather than straining - and I’d been straining for so long, it no longer caused me headaches.

I Twitter’d, Friday night, that it’d been dark for over 40 minutes and I’d not had a single trick-or-treater…shortly after I updated, I got one - it was nothing like Halloween on Hitt Street in Boyd (they closed down the street for trick-or-treating and we’d have thousands of people) but we did have a good turn out - when I’d finally had enough, I dumped my candy bucket in this one kids pillow case, because he had a darn good costume and I was bone tired and wanted to relax.

Our anniversary is in six days - that’s Saturday for all you guys out there wondering. Followed directly by the Marine Corps birthday (11/10) then Jerrett’s 14th birthday (11/12) rounding out the month with Thanksgiving (11/27) and my birthday(s) (11/23 & 11/28) - it’s a full month, for sure.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do for the holidays. We had originally planned on going to Texas, but financially - with the economy and whatnot, it’s just not in the cards. Then, we’d thought we might head out to Bakersfield to spend the holidays with that side of the family, but as that time draws closer and closer - it’s not looking like we will - so who knows. We’ve got a week or so to decide…

Anyway, that about sums up what is going on here. We’re hanging out, as usual, for a day of absolutely zero excitement.