I really can't believe all of this happened in a week

Okay.  Ima see if I can even remember what all has happened over the past week since I've been on here.

My mom was here for 9 days.  Her husband was here for 3 of them.  And they completely wore my butt out.  No, they didn't spank me.  They just kept me incredibly busy.

My mom got to my house on the Friday night before Thanksgiving.  On Saturday morning I was in the shower by 6:15, out the door by 7:30, had a mammogram at 8:00, met my mom and one of my aunts at 8:30, and drove them to the outlet malls up near South Carolina to meet another aunt for the day.  We got back home around 8:00 that night.  And then my mom and I stayed up until almost 1:00 a.m. playing cards.  After having that as my first day with her in town, I knew I was in trouble in the exhaustion department with a week to go.

We got cheap (but good) massages.  We went shopping in all of the stores she misses in Atlanta that she doesn't have in her town out in Texas.  We did grocery shopping for Thanksgiving. We went out to dinner almost every night.  We stayed up late playing cards every night.  We went through paperwork my brothers and I have gotten out of my dad's house that has my mom's personal info included, we went through boxes of pictures, we made some slight changes to decor in part of my house, and we did some laundry and cleaning (well, I did.....I didn't make my mom clean and do laundry).

And by the way, I was also working and doing all of this stuff around my job.  And I have major sleep issues and never sleep past about 3:30 every single morning. But I'm way too exhausted from never sleeping soundly to get up and blog in the middle of the night.

Wednesday night her husband flew in to town.  Thursday my mom, her husband, my older brother and I went to my fun neighbors' house for Thanksgiving dinner and stayed there most of the day.

Friday we did our family Thanksgiving because that worked better for some of our other family members' work schedules, split up family schedules, etc.  But before my mom and I could start prepping and cooking for hours and hours and hours, we had to go Lowe's to get a new deadbolt for my front door (yet another thing that broke in my house - for the second time), yard trash bags, and a bunch of flood lights because her husband was bored and wanted to work on stuff.  Which, YAY!

So now I have flood lights which light up my house as bright as though you are standing on the sun.  Y'all.  I'm not kidding.  You can probably see my house from outer space standing out more than any other house in the entire state of Georgia.  Unfortunately, the fixture that is right behind my bedroom windows has a malfunctioning motion detector so they just stay on all night.  All night.  Shine.  Shine.  Shine in my window.  And the one on the corner of the garage (also right behind my bedroom) has an overly sensitive motion detector and if a breeze blows and a limb or leaf on a tree 800 feet away moves the lights turn on.  And off.  On.  And off.  All night long.  But I am grateful because I'd rather have bright lights than the pitch black that I've had out there for the entire first year I've been in this house because remember?  I live in the 'hood.  And I have had two snakes in my driveway.  So I'll take the bright lights to hopefully scare off the thugs and so I don't step on a wiggly, bitey, poisonous snake.

After her husband replaced all of my flood lights and messed with them trying to get them to work properly and changed my deadbolt he said, "I really need another couple of weeks at your house to fix stuff."  Which?  Dude.  I know.  Daisy Jane's Dough Drain did not get that name because everything is in great shape up in here.

Anyway, my mom and her husband left Saturday morning to drive back to Texas (yes....they drove.  yes....it's a long trip) and I collapsed on my sofa from complete and utter exhaustion.

But only for a little while.  Then I decided that the massive amount of leaves in my yard and up and down my driveway really was getting ridiculous.  And I was afraid I'd step on a wiggly, bitey, poisonous snake that might be coiled up in a leaf pile.  That happened to my grandmother once.  She was about to step right down on a copperhead but thankfully saw it coiled up in the leaves at the last second.  So I blew leaves.  I raked leaves.  And when it was all said and done, there were 16 of those giant paper yard bags crammed as full as they could possibly be crammed full of leaves.  SIXTEEN bags of leaves.  I have a postage stamp sized lawn.  It's like an itty bitty baby yard.  It's 1/3 of an acre and my house, driveway and detached garage take up about 85% of it.  A few of y'all have seen it in person.  Can y'all imagine there being 16 bags of leaves in my teeny little yard?

Y'all, I don't even have a single big tree on my property.  I wish mother nature made leaves fall right under the tree they came from and never blow into another person's yard.  Because I have 4 tiny little trees and I would have had one bag at the most if that's how things worked.  I also dug up a small tree that was growing in a really undesirable place for a tree but the roots were already pretty major and that was not easy to dig up.  Within 15 minutes of quitting yard work, I could barely move and I knew I'd be in deep doo by the next day.

So I went ahead and pulled my Christmas tree out Saturday evening while I could kind of sort of still move.  And that's as far as I have gotten with decorating.  My tree is completely off kilter but after I messed with it for a while and my butt muscles and back muscles and hamstrings were getting more and more painful by the second, I gave up.  So maybe by next weekend I'll manage to get the tree to stand up straight and get some decorations on it.

By the time I went to bed Saturday night, I felt like someone had beat me to a bloody pulp.  Yard work ain't for sissies.  I almost cried I was hurting so horribly.

Sunday morning?  I did cry I hurt so much.  And I knew I had to go to my dad's house to meet my brother to move more stuff.  Which made me cry even harder.  I felt like I had done 12335496347634 squats while holding 94658436594 pounds.  Oh it was awful!  It hurt to lay down.  It hurt to stand up.  It hurt to sit.  It hurt to walk.  It is now Tuesday and my left butt cheek still trembles from pain off and on throughout the day.  You cannot find a more out of shape person than I am.  Yesterday I donated blood for a Red Cross blood drive in our office and I could barely get in and out of those lounge chairs they have you sit in.  It was humiliating!

Sunday at my dad's house was AWFUL.  Once this is all over I may tell y'all just how incredibly awful his wife has treated us.  But just as an example, she tried to take our grandmother's desk from us and when that didn't work because her kids protected it for us, just to be vengeful she went to my dad's bookshelves and took the only books I had said I wanted.  My dad had hundreds and hundreds of books and the ONLY books she took was the set I had expressed wanting.  She has shredded boxes and boxes of his papers from his entire life.  We have no idea what she has shredded.  It has been 4 months of complete hell dealing with her since my dad passed away.  As a reminder, she was only married to him for 2 years.  She has moved a good bit of her stuff out of the house and promised she would leave us a key so we could get in anytime we wanted.  We got there and she had not left a key.  Luckily, my brother had one on his keyring.  Then she showed up and said, "I didn't leave y'all a key.  How did you get in my house?"  MY HOUSE?  Her name was nowhere on any piece of paper having to do with that house. My brother told her he had a key and she said, "I don't remember giving you one."  And he told her it was the one he had when he used to live there because it's been our family home for almost 35 years.  Way before you came along, lady.  Then she followed us around to see what we were doing so we decided to go eat so that she would just leave.  Then we went back and packed up our cars with the stuff we came for.  Also, while we were there she hugged on us, kissed us, and kept telling us how much she loves us and that when she gets settled in her new place she wants us to come over for dinner.  Um.  No.  I've known a lot of two faced people in my life, but if I could tell y'all all of the stuff she's done, all of the stuff her kids have told us she's said about us,  and then have her acting all sweet and innocent and like she loves us, you would agree that she takes the cake in the two faced people department.  Because that's a real department right there.

Since I didn't get home until 9:00 Sunday night and then had to unload an entire SUV full of photography equipment that I have to take and have appraised (I think I had almost 45 cameras in my car) AND could barely move without screaming from the pain, I did not change the sheets and clean the bathroom after my mom left and before my renter came back last night.  But at least I had bright lights like the sun to unload my car.

That's why I didn't blog at y'all last night.  Because I had to work, then go to the grocery store, then come home, unload groceries, change sheets on a bed and clean a bathroom.  And girl, I was beat after this entire past week.

Before I made it to the grocery store, you'll never guess what I did.  I got on the elevator in the parking deck of my building and a City of Atlanta police officer got on too.  I then flung my arms and hands up in the air rather wildly and said loudly, "MAN!  YOU'RE GOING DOWN!"  This is something I would never advise any of you to do and say to an officer of the law.  He raised his eyebrows and said, "Um, excuse me m'am?"  And I yelled, "NO!  NO!  NOT YOU.  YOU'RE NOT GOING DOWN.  I AM NOT GOING TO MAKE YOU GO DOWN!  The elevator is going down.  But I need to go up.  I got on the wrong elevator is all."  And he mumbled something incoherently and moved as far away from me as he could get.

Oh my goodness.  I am exhausted.

BUT, BUT, BUT.....I also found out this past week that I seem to be cancer free!!!!!  The biopsy came back negative.  YIPPEE!  I have to have another ultrasound in a couple of months to follow-up and see what's going on at that point.

With all of this nonsense going on in my life, don't y'all think Hot Brazilian is going to be so glad to be back here living it with me soon?  Ha!  He's going to stampede back to Brazil within a week of getting off the plane.  He'd probably rather chase his meat source into a snake infested river than deal with the drama I have going on in my life currently.

Also, because I can't seem to post Music Monday results on a timely basis with the things I have going on right now, I think I'm going to put it on hold until after the holidays are over.  Because if y'all think my life is crazy now, you should see how it gets during the holidays - and we are still going to be dealing with my dad's house and his beyotch of a wife for at least another month or two.  I already know of 2 Christmas parties, a girls weekend out of town, two (and possibly three) house guests coming at different points during the month of December, and my mom and her husband are contemplating coming back for Christmas.  And Hot Brazilian is supposed to be here the week between Christmas and the New Year.  And oh yeah, I have not even made a list of what gifts I need to buy, much less actually gone out to buy them.  So yes, I think I'll put Music Monday on hold for a month and I will blog as often as I can.  It really stinks that I can't get on the internet at work. 

Y'all tell me some crazy stuff going on in your life right now so that I don't feel so alone.....