My Clerks Moment

If you've ever seen the movie Clerks (and if you haven't, and you have a slightly dark sense of humor, watch it now), you're familiar with the character Dante and his constant refrain of, "I'm not even supposed to be here today." That's how I'm feeling today. Our internet is down at home. I'm hoping it's just the router which is easy to replace, and not the line to the house, which would be a huge deal to fix/replace. We had this happen once before when our neighbor was digging a hole for a new fence post and cut the line. So fingers crossed that our router just died! At any rate, I'm supposed to be working from home today, but obviously that's not a possibility without internet. I feel rather whiny complaining about lack of internet access when I know there are people in the world who don't have access to clean water. But the reality is that in our house, internet is another utility just like water and electricity, and lots of things become problematic without that access.

I got to the bus stop this morning and par for the course with the way things have been going recently, the bus was late. Last night we went to pick up my new truck, which we had left at the dealership while I was out of town so they could repaint the hood since it was scratched when we bought it. They just buffed the area (again, they already tried that once before) and still didn't fix it, even though they had it for five days. I also got a notice from the city that our water will be disconnected if I don't pay our bill. The bill I've already paid (on time), so now I have to call and figure out what happened with that. My son who has already failed to turn in his math homework twice before (and school's only been in session a little over a week) forgot to bring his homework home again last night. My husband has already been in discussions with the teacher about the type of homework she's sending home and what she told the kids about the types of algorithms they can use to solve the problems. I just want to crawl back into bed right now and pull the covers over my head.

None of these things are very big deals, and taken one at a time I wouldn't even be fazed. But right now with everything piling up, I'm struggling to keep a positive attitude. It didn't help that upon returning to work yesterday I got to marinate in the stress everyone is experiencing here right now with the state of our industry in general and our company in particular. Needless to say, I wish I was back on the farm right now! There was no internet there either, but I expected it there.

I was able to get a couple of the pictures off my camera from our trip to share today though.

This picture is of my mom, my grandma, and me. It's a little blurry, my cousin took it and unfortunately didn't hold the camera completely still. But you can see all of us. (Neither my grandma nor my mom color their hair; I hope I get that gene!)

The soybean field behind my grandma's yard.

The barn and bin at my aunt's house, which is the same house where my grandma was born and grew up.

The sunset one evening.

My grandma's old sheep house.

This map shows how close my grandma lives to my uncle and two of my aunts (my mom's other sister lives in Colorado near us).