Sometimes things happen every now and then that tend to shake up our normal lives and routines. You know these types of things I’m sure. A move to a new dwelling, sudden illness, the car terminally breaking, financial problems, a sudden windfall, etc, etc. With any luck these sort of “wake up calls” that throw our respective lives into turmoil are spaced out a bit so we only have to deal with one say, every 4 to 5 months–or so we hope. Unfortunately, it’s not so in our little household in the Clyde River valley or at least it wasn’t this time around.

No, I’m wrong there. It always happens like this. Everything happens at once it seems and this time was no exception. So with no further delay and in no particular order…

I start insulin and eyesight goes on vacation.

I began injecting insulin at the end of October and by the second week in November everything is blurry. Sure, having my blood sugar reading at something less than the sugar content of a pint of maple syrup is great but not being able to see is not so great. That plus I seem to be having all these massive low blood sugar attacks. Especially when I’m not doing anything. Like at 3:00 AM in the morning for instance when waking up dead is not an acceptable situation. So now I can’t see well enough to find the refrigerator that contains the orange juice I need to drink at 3:00 AM during a rather bad hypoglycemic attack that has me three quarters the way to passing out.

And right about this time…

We have to move my wife’s quilt shop.

Yes, now that we put all the effort into remodeling her 500 square foot quilt shop, my wife came to the notice of one of our local (one of the oldest and most respected and most successful) commercial real estate developers in the State that just happens to own the plaza that runs along the shore of Lake Memphremagog here in Newport. Appropriately named the “Waterfront Plaza” of course. And it just so happens that he loves the idea of her selling only Vermont made products, that she makes all her quilted items she sells herself in store and it just so happens that the center store front has gone empty so he wants her in there and he wants her in there right now!

Okay, so this is all fine and dandy and although Laurie would normally balk at moving from a small 500 square foot shop to a 2002 square foot store (with 3 times the rent as you might imagine) we both decided that this time it just felt right–so we went.

In fact we moved the whole kit and caboodle in 10 days despite my constant low blood sugar attacks and blurry eyesight and our mutual exhaustion. But one thing for certain though…we had all the energy of a couple of anemic gnats as compared to the last time we moved the shop (gasp, cough, wheeze, die). We were all done in by the time 3:00 in the afternoon rolled around and we just knew we had to keep it up till well past dinner time everyday if we were going to make opening day on the 21st of November. It’s the holidays after all and everyone hits the plaza.

Of course with the move to a much bigger store front comes the need for financing the endeavor which means contacting the small business loan department head of our local bank who further complicates matters by sending my wife a…

Corrupted .pdf loan application that demolishes her Windows partition.

My wife uses Windows 7, she has a degree in computer systems management and she knows how to secure her system…and so do I. And we don’t use Adobe Reader but another well known PDF reader that has no history of vulnerabilities whatsoever so in other words, our Windows installations are terribly fortified. Despite all that, attempting to open this damn loan application .pdf file sent to her by our bank ended up corrupting her entire Windows partition as well the compact flash card from her camera that just happened to be plugged into her computer at the time.

(But it didn’t touch the Linux Mint 10 installation that lives in it’s own partition on the same hard drive mwahahahahaha!! So she’s been using that instead while her husband semi-blindly wobbles about here and there until he manages to figure out this insulin thing.)

But this is our bank. A local bank. The bank that holds our mortgage for heavens sake. Should I be worried now? I think so!

And to top it all off…

Our second oldest cat decides to die.

And rather messily as well. The reason that I called him our second oldest cat is because our first oldest cat had already passed on this past summer. This time, right after we had decided to move the quilt shop, I had to take Dingo for his last ride to the vet. And since we had already begun the process of moving I didn’t have the time to bury him so let’s just say it’s a good thing we have a rather large deep freezer where we could put the “cat coffin”. Come to think of this I really need to attend to his burial in our little pet cemetery before the ground freezes over.

So, even though some might think that all the above might not be a good enough excuse for not writing up 2 or 3 posts over the last couple of weeks–I do! I do have a couple ideas for a couple more posts in the very near future plus pics of my honey’s new quilt store. So stay tuned my dear readers (all 4 or 5 of you) for there is indeed more to come.

Unless something else comes up of course…all at once.