Taking a Breathe

I know that I have been away for awhile and I appreciate all my readers being patient while I was away. Let me catch you up on all my latest happenings!

Last month I successfully closed on another house! (I posted pictures in a previous post) I moved back home to Brownwood to be closer to the woman I call mom - Karen. She has been fighting cancer since September. She completed her chemo treatments last month about the same time I was closing on and moving into my new house. Spring was here the weather was beautiful and I was going to be close to Karen, as well as, my sister, niece and various old friends I had not seen in years.

I accepted my bio dad's offer to help move me. We discussed it and decided to do the move early on a Saturday morning. However, about 5 days prior to the move date I received a call from his wife. She kept asking me questions about going ahead and starting the move on Thursday or Friday morning. I told her, "Debbie, I won't even have access to the house until Friday morning after the 10am closing appointment." She said, "oh I know but maybe you could borrow more than one trailer from someone and leave a load setting somewhere until you have the keys." What? That makes no sense to me. Why would I want to leave all of my belongings loaded on some trailer somewhere in Brownwood just to start moving a couple of days early? I told her no that wasn't an option especially since it was supposed to be raining all that week that the earliest I could start moving things would be Friday afternoon. She said ok, your dad will follow you to Stephenville to get a load on Friday instead of Saturday then. Hmmm weird. Why was she in such a rush? She made me feel like he really didn't want to help me. If that was the case I was going to be pissed off. This man had neglected and abandoned me my entire life. I had stayed away from him for years because I was sick of the feeling of neglect. After all these years I decided to give him one more try and if he backed out on me the one time he was supposed to help me (keep in mind - he volunteered, I did not ask) I would never speak to him again.

Well needless to say Friday rolled around. I had spent the previous day loading the trailer I borrowed from Karen. I was heading off to sign the closing papers on the new house and unload the first load. My friend Amber met me at the new house and we (including her 4 year old son Pierce) unloaded the first load! Whew! I was already getting tired. Now I needed to run to Debbie's store and meet Dad to head back to Stephenville. I arrived and guess what..........they were not there. They were out running errands together and now it was starting to rain. Ugh! I told him I would be there around noon. It was now 12:30pm. What was he doing. This was his idea! Ugh! I called him on his cell. They would be back in a minute. I told him hurry, it was raining and we needed to hurry. Finally around 1:15pm or so they showed up. Debbie was gonna go with us....why? She wasn't going to be able to help. She couldn't stand for more than 5 seconds at a time....blah blah blah......whatever let's get on the road.

They followed me up to Stephenville. Where we proceeded to load everything left at the house. We parked along the property on the side street in order to load both trailers at the same time. Psycho neighbor ( I have talked about him previously) comes driving down the road and then just sits there like they can't get by. We specifically parked so that people could drive by. We waved them to go on and continued to load the trailers. Not surprisingly, a police car pulls up. You have to be kidding me I tell the officer as he gets out of his car. He says have ya'll been blocking traffic? I say no! We have been parked liked this for the past hour and everyone has been able to drive thru. I tell him not to worry, I was loading the last bit of my belongings and would be out of that town for good! (I didn't want him to tell psycho neighbor I still owned the house and harass the new tenant). The officer leaves laughing.

We finish loading which I will admit it was a great help to have my dad there but I wish he could make a decision without having to be led around by his nose. Every time he picked something up he would ask me, "what trailer do you want this in?", "What do you want me to load next?", "what else goes?" I swear I said flatbed trailer, covered trailer, and everything goes more times in 2 hours than I had ever said in my life!

Finally, we were headed back on the road to Brownwood


So who was calling me? You might be wondering. My dad. He was calling to tell me that he and Debbie were calling her son to have him bring the 4 boys they had custody of (that's a long story for another day) to meet us at my new house (Great) to help unload the trailers in the rain. Ok, fine whatever. I was so exhausted at this point I just wanted his trailer unloaded so I could be alone at my new house. It was about 8pm by this time. It had been more than a long day. We arrived at the house and of course the first thing out of dad's mouth was, what do you want to do now? "Unload the trailers" is all I said. I opened the house and put Koda inside. Thank God for her or I might have lost my mind. We began carrying things in. Everything was labeled to make unloading easier. Debbie sat in a chair in the front yard pointing and ordering the 4 boys around (which drove me crazy because she was more in the way than anything). The boys would unload from the trailer bring to the door where I would take it and put in what room it was supposed to be in. Then dad and Beau would carry the furniture in putting in down in places where it was in the way, but at this point I didn't care. The 4 boys were rowdy and dad was being his obnoxious self making racial comments towards the 4 boys, and making comments to make them be afraid of Koda. I finally ended up shouting at dad, "Stop talking to the boys like that and stop trying to make them be afraid of Koda. It abusive to the boys to call them the names you are calling them and I won't have it and if you make them afraid of Koda she will sense it and then there might be an accident! Just STOP IT RIGHT NOW!"

Quickly, the rest of the trailers were unloaded and then it came out. The reason they wanted to move me all in one day. They had plans to go camping at the lake. Now, someone tell me why in the hell would you volunteer to do something and then make plans to do something else that same weekend? Whatever! Then dad said well what do you want to do now? I said, "Thank you for helping, but ya'll have to leave now and Koda and I are gonna bathe (I had had the plumber at the new house fixing a busted pipe in the bathroom while I was in Stephenville loading stuff) and then we are going to try and unpack some stuff and relax tonight. It was about 10pm by now.

Koda and I both took a nice hot bath (not together of course - that would be weird) and then I unpacked enough things to be able to lay down and read and relax for the night. Saturday was going to be a busy day because Direct Tv was coming to hook up service, I needed to unpack more so that Monday I could at least have all my work/class stuff to be able to function until the house was unpacked at set up and I still needed to get to the grocery store because I had nothing in the house to eat or drink.