When Ship Happens

I'm Done!

Hey guys!!  It's official.  I am done with school!  The past 4 years were crazy, but I know it was worth it.  I thought I could be super human, hold down a full time job, a part time travel agency, and go back to college, all while being a good wife, attentive mom, keep a clean house, and blog in my spare time.  (Spare time... that was funny!)  Sooo... in case you were wondering ... not all of those things happened.  The reality was I was a scattered mess.  Thankfully, I have a family that loves me unconditionally and wonderful travel clients.  Mark hired me a housekeeper so I didn't completely lose my mind, but I still ended up ordering Trenton's yearbook twice and forgot to turn in the order form for his letter jacket!  Mark saved the day on that one too.  I also managed to kill my computer.  Typed on that silly thing until the keys fell off... Literally, I lost the E, S, 2, J, N and finally the Power button before the Geek Squad guy said: "Lady, this computer is NOT fixable!"   I have lugged a computer all over the Caribbean, knocked out 2 degrees and I am now ready to return to civilization... and blogging!  I am sure Mark is going to feel like he just got a raise now that we don't have to send any more money to Texas Tech... however, the housekeeper stays!

I am not sure what to do with myself in my free time.  I have been reading books I actually WANT to read... so if you have any good recommendations, send them my way!  We took a short trip to Miami the weekend Trenton got out of school.  He worked super hard this year, made the A honor roll every 6 weeks, finished with a GPA of 103 and even took 2 AP classes for college credit.  He made Top 10% of his Sophomore class. So, while he may not have perfect attendance due to our cruising addiction, I think he's doing pretty well! 

I'm going to start working on a short blog of our Miami trip and our next cruise is in a couple of weeks.  We will be trying out Royal Caribbean for the first time and are excited about that adventure!  I'll be sure to share it with you... so stay tuned!

Happy New Year ... Here's to Good Health!

Happy New Year Everyone!  I hope you all had a wonderful and safe start to 2016.  After a car accident, jacked up neck, torn calf muscle and broken shoulder... my resolution for 2015 is just to stay in 1 piece.  I think that's a good one.  Trenton had a friend over... I put on my PJ's, fell asleep by 9pm and set my alarm for 11:30 to get up and ring in the new year. 

 

I do have a bucket list goal of taking a New Year's cruise so I am saving up my party days for when that happens.

 

The last week of 2015 Mark and I were both sitting on the couch after coming home from work and decided about 6pm that neither one of us felt good.  We both vitamined ourselves up and headed off to bed.  My spell check is telling me "vitamined" is not a word, but I have decided that it is exactly what we did so Webster should pick up on that.  If they have stooped so low to add the word "ain't" to the dictionary (my grandmother surely turned over in her grave that day), they could certainly add vitamined. 

The next day I headed off to work and Mark didn't make it out of bed.  When I came home... he looked near death and had a raging fever.  I went to the store and came back with every medicine known to man and did my best to overdose him.  I sent a message to Trenton to stay away from his Dad and I locked Mark in the bedroom and prayed for the best.  After essentially no sleep because I refused to sleep in there with Mark and risk death for myself ... I headed off to work the next morning. Still not feeling great... but feeling good enough to thank my lucky stars I wasn't Mark.  Thanks to all my medicating, he looked a little better the next day, and frankly, I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to crawl in my own bed.  The problem here was.... I was certain Mark's dying germs had invaded it.

In my mind there was only 1 logical answer to getting me back in my own bed.... Lysol.  I snuck in the bedroom and stole my pillow off the bed, doused it with Lysol and put on a new pillow case.  That should do the trick.  Then as I went to get into the bed... I got a little scared.  There must be germs on the sheets and comforter too.  So with Mark blissfully sleeping, armed with the flashlight on my cell phone, I proceeded to spray my side of the bed down with Lysol before climbing in. 

Now.... I really do not have any recollection of the next events because when I go to sleep... I go to sleep!  I do however, seem to have some sort of disorder where I will get up and interact with awake human beings and never actually BE awake.  Sometimes I make sense... most of the times I don't.  I never recall these said events, but the stories are plentiful and seem to bring enjoyment to those who have witnessed them.  These next events surely had to do with bad Karma on Mark's part for all the times he messed with me and completely took advantage of this situation. 

The way he tells it, he found himself awake in the middle of the night because he had been sleeping for days.  I, somehow unprovoked, sat straight up in bed.... grabbed my can of Lysol and commenced to spraying him down with it.  Not a little spray... a continuous one... that left a huge cloud... ended up getting in his mouth and left him coughing and gasping for breath.  Then I set the can down as if this was a normal occurrence, laid back down on my pillow and was back fast asleep as if nothing had happened. 

NOW..... I find it hard to believe I just sat up and sprayed him for no reason.  He must have coughed or sneezed or done something to set me off.  AND...Since this said "Lysoling event", Mark is drastically better so really he should just say THANK YOU! ... and I didn't catch his death germs that night so clearly it worked! It says it right there on the can.... "Kills Cold and Flu Viruses"

He still took my Lysol can away from me.

Here's to 2016!

My husband... Captain Obvious

Does your husband ever spout out a completely obvious, yet ridiculous statement?  Yeah… mine too.  “Hey Babe, sure has been awhile since you wrote a blog.”  Yeah?  You think?

So we took our Christmas Cruise and it was fantastic!  We came back home and I ended up getting a promotion at work.  Yea for me!  They leave me in charge of people… can you believe that shit?  It changed me from working 3 days a week 36 hours to Monday through Friday 40 hours a week.  My 4 days off a week are now only 2 days off a week.  Mark ended up getting notice he was going to be laid off at his job unless we packed up our family and moved to Arizona… or Arkansas… I don’t know.  Some state that started with an A and the answer was No so who really cares where it was.  Thankfully the day his job ended, he was hired that evening by a new company and was able to start immediately.  That was the good news… the bad news is he has had to travel for weeks at a time since March… so while I am now working more hours, I am also the only one home taking care of the kid.  Get off work, pick him up from school, off to Jiu Jitsu, home for homework, someone’s gotta make dinner and honestly it’s a 50/50 chance of whether it will be edible or not… sometimes we have to pack up and go to Whataburger.  The laundry has to be done, dishes have to be washed, we have 2 cats, a hedgehog and a robo hamster I am on a great winning streak of keeping alive.  The neighbor started mowing the yard and Thank God for Juana who comes every 2 weeks to clean the toilets because I seriously do not have time for that.

If all that wasn’t enough… I got this fancy schmancy promotion without having a bachelor’s degree.  Now, I went to college long enough to get a bachelor’s degree.  4 full years, including summer semesters and all I walked away with was an Associate’s degree.  It has served me very well for the past 15 years and good news is I know a little bit about a whole lot of things :)  It wasn’t required, but I figured if I was going to be a Supervisor, I should have a bachelor’s degree…. So I got the hair brained idea to go back to college.  Ugh. 

Wanna know that hardest part of going back to college??  Writing the papers.  My style of writing and their style of writing don’t match up.  And here’s the truth…. This isn’t my first rodeo.  Do you remember back in school when you swore to your parents there was no need for you to learn algebra because you would never use it a day in your life?  Well, I use algebra.  I DO NOT have to write research papers and put everything in APA format, so making me do it for my college papers isn’t going over well with me.  YOU REALLY DON’T NEED TO DO THAT EVER IN YOUR REAL LIFE! 

I have had to do 1 big group project…. It was a whole new level of hell.  Apparently, I don’t work well with others.  You know… they are 18 and I am … well, not.  Procrastinating until 10pm on the night the project is due doesn’t work well for me.  I had to take a personality test.  They say I am a perfectionist and known for setting unrealistic expectations on myself and others.  I can see that to an extent… but I get my shit done!  So, it really wasn’t that unrealistic after all was it?

Making matters worse... y’all know Trenton and I were in that car wreck before our Christmas cruise.  That took me out of commission for a couple of months from working out.  It didn’t take too long for my abdomen and the bruises to heal, but it messed up neck pretty good.  So I had just gotten back into working out and I was on a mission to be in good shape for our summer cruise when I got a partial tear in my calf muscle.  Yep… who does that?  6-8 weeks of no working out… period.  Any my orthopedic doc works at the hospital I do and then he put me in our hospital’s physical therapy…. I think because he didn’t trust me to follow his orders.  So I have been playing superwoman above all while hobbling around town.  Good news is I can finally make it down the drive way to check the mail and back up again.  In the beginning, nothing short of crawling up the driveway could get me back to the house.  That was mildly embarrassing.  I have started attempting to work out again.  (I am at 6 weeks), but I can’t run or jump, or turn fast.  Bleh!

Moving on…. we cruise again in 39 days.  Mom fell at work the other day and literally shattered her elbow.  She will have surgery on Wednesday.  So we will see where that leaves us.  We do have cruise insurance, but she is determined to go.  She said she should be recuperating and can do that just as well sitting on her balcony on a cruise as she can sitting in her chair at home.  So other than trying to figure out how we are going to haul her luggage around, we are praying for the best.

My travel agent business is booming!  I have booked lots of cruises during this time and you guys are sending me awesome referrals to the blog and for people who need cruises booked and for that I am eternally grateful!  I seriously have the best cruise friends ever!  Cruises keep my sanity.

So no babe…. I haven’t written a blog lately.  I have just taken it as a personal achievement that we are all wearing clean underwear!

The Importance of Travel Insurance… Hell, just the importance of insurance period.

I have always purchased travel insurance.  There have been many vacations where we had to save every last penny we had just to pay for it…. I still found the extra money for insurance.  More than once I tried to talk myself out of it.  We are young.  We are healthy.  We have approved vacations.  Deep down, I always felt some sense of guilt if I didn’t do it.  Like, how mad am I going to be if the unimaginable happens and I’m not covered?  Not to mention, if I had to scrounge up the money just to pay for the insurance… I dang sure didn’t have the resources to cover an emergency.

This year all my obsessive insurance tendencies paid off.

The year carried on as well and uneventful as any other right up until we hit September.  Somehow, Trenton accidentally kicked me in the mouth.  What became of that little accident was a clogged salivary gland in my lip.  Ever heard of that?  Yeah, me neither.  $900 dollars later… and that was after my insurance paid their part, it was surgically removed.  Take care of your salivary glands peeps…they are expensive!

At the same time, our renter of a year and a half decided she would start moving drug dealers into our rent house and that their “other” activities, including buying a brand new car, were more important than paying rent.  Thus began the eviction process.  Let me just tell you… I don’t belong in court.  Walking the streets of downtown Fort Worth and hanging out in courthouses really isn’t my thing.  I only like walking through metal detectors if it means I am getting on a cruise ship!

Not to mention… I am a dreamer.  I always have vivid dreams and paying the mortgage on a house for a whole pot load of free loaders and drug dealers to live in rent free really set me off!  I kept dreaming I was inviting everyone I knew over to that house and cooking dinner in their kitchen because if I was paying for it…. By George, I was going to use it!  Anyone that knows me knows... I don't cook! ... It was exhausting! 

During this 60 day process they also began destroying our house and there was essentially nothing we could do.  Even after they were officially evicted… they still didn’t leave and I was forced to go back to court again to pay more money to have the Constables forcefully remove them.  Thankfully that worked… only they left half their crap in the house that I had to physically move to the front yard and then pay for someone to haul off before I got a code enforcement ticket.  $8000 in damages later the house was fixed. 

I began to panic because this was seriously starting to cut into my cruise fund money.  Thank goodness during this time Mark received one of the coveted “free cruise certificates” in the mail.  I have no idea why he gets all the good stuff… I plan and book all the cruises… I write the blog… he gets all the perks. 

So I checked out this free cruise flyer and none of the dates matched what we could do with our schedules.  I was booking a cruise for a friend of mine and thought … just for the heck of it I would plug in Mark’s voucher and see if it worked on any other cruises.  The only cruise we could take that fit our schedules was leaving Christmas Eve… and it worked!  We could get an inside cabin for $100 with $100 OBC.  I added Trenton to the room and upgraded us to a balcony.  As so it began :)

We put our newly remodeled rent house up for sale and received a contract for full asking price on day 2.  This seemed perfect… except it was a VA loan and hence the VA Bull$h!t began :)  Such an important organization and it is run in such a horrible manner… so is the VA medical... Don't get me started on that!  I just don’t get it.  Aaanyway…. We are still going round and round and closing dates are still delayed and rescheduled.  I suppose we’ll pick up where we left off when we get back from our cruise.

During this time a girl from our Facebook Cruise Group wrote that the “upgrade fairy” had just called her offering them a suite, but they turned it down.  So I wrote her and said… you don’t happen to have a call back number for them do you?  Well, she did!  So I called the guy back and

said “Hey.. you just offered my friend an upgrade to a Suite and she declined… can I have it?” 

He said… "Well, you aren’t on the list." 

So I replied “OK, what do I need to do for you to put me on the list?”  ha ha 

When it was all said and done, I upgraded our balcony room to our very first Ocean Suite.  All 3 of us are now cruising in a suite for less than what we normally pay for 1 person!!  Score!!

THEN:

16 days before our cruise the heater went out at our house we actually live in.  Just perfect!  Thanks to the 2 companies we dealt with, I am inclined to believe that all Heating/AC people are crooks.  We were convinced we needed a whole new inside unit… which caused thousands of dollars more to flow out of my cruise account and come to find out now… all they really had to do was replace a $25 breaker.  I have tried to take a Christian approach to this and think… perhaps they needed the money more than I did… but clearly they don’t know that some of these cruises are actually a NEED for mental stability and not so much of a WANT.  I have a feeling they are about to find out. 

So before the heater was actually replaced… the first crook that came out to look at our heater would NOT leave our house.  We were going on over 2 hours and the dude was still there… camped out in my living room.  He didn’t fix shit. It was just T and I at home because Mark was working in Arkansas.  He quoted me $9-11,000 to replace my heater and I finally told him to just get the hell out. 

By this time it was late and Trenton was starving.  I had worked all day and I was tired.  So we jumped in the car and drove down the road to Subway to get something to eat.  On our way back home… less than a mile from our house a kid with no driver’s license and no insurance “tried to avoid something in the road”… jerked his wheel too hard to the left which careened his car over 3 lanes of traffic where he took the bumper off of a mini van … which then propelled him across the turn lane and head on directly in front of my car traveling 50 mph.  No chance to swerve… no chance to hit the break.  Just airbags and glass … and Subway sodas flying everywhere.   At some point I opened my eyes and took in a breath and thought “Dear Lord, I am alive.” … which led to frantic screaming for Trenton who was perfectly fine.  I learned that day… I drive with Angels.  How cool is that?  Trenton didn’t have a scratch on him.  He wasn’t even injured from the air bag. At the hospital as I lay on that little table sliding back and forth through the cat scan machine I thought… This is why I purchase travel insurance! 

 

However… the end of this year sucked so bad… I am going on that damn cruise!  I also found out why I have always insisted we have full coverage insurance on our cars… including Un-Insured Motorist and Personal Injury Protection.  Medical bills are paid… Car has been replaced… and you still have a blogger :)

So seriously folks…. Don’t take insurance lightly.

Pre Cruise Drama

Well… it’s Pre Cruise time again.  Life seems to flow on by completely normal until we hit a few weeks pre cruise and then the universe spins one way, we spin the other… the Earth falls off its axis and the whole thing just turns into one big mess! 

About 20 days before we were due to leave, Trenton was at a birthday party.  He decided to do a cannon ball off a trampoline into a foam pit… missed the foam and landed on his back.  Which put us in the ER and had doctor’s appointments for days until they finally decided he did not have a compound fracture in his back.  Thank goodness for prayer.  He is finally on the mend.

18 days before we were due to leave, Mark started a new job.  Task #1 … fly to Corpus Christie, Texas.  He was already stressing about how long the flight to San Juan was going to be.  Now he found himself having to get on a plane… ALONE… for the first time ever.  I will say he survived and took it like a champ!  We still have 9 days to go and he has already flown 4 times!  He’s even made it through some mishaps.  2^nd plane ride was delayed at takeoff.  Then they landed and sat on the tarmac for over an hour before they were allowed to get off.  I started to get a little worried because he wasn’t answering my text messages anymore… finally I decided I might need to transfer some money over out of the savings because I was pretty sure he was going to jail.  Come to find out… he was not detained, but had called the Operations department and managed to get himself transferred to the ground crew demanding to be let off the plane.  Then told the flight attendant’s he was being held hostage…LOL

5 minutes later they were released to go :)

Plane ride #3 happened to be in the middle of a storm.  The passenger beside him was Catholic and kept praying and crossing herself… and refused to shut the window…which increased Mark’s anxiety… then the flight attendant’s buckled themselves into the empty passenger seats.  He thought the plane was going down for sure!  In the future turbulence should be no big deal :)

So while Mark has been gone for the better part of 2 weeks.  9 days to go… I decided to mow the yard for him.  Then I decided the front flower bed (which I am banned from touching because it appears I am allergic to it) looked really bad.  So I thought… you know… I’ll just pull all this purple stuff out real quick then go inside and wash my arms and it will be no big deal.

Well… as much as I have tried to talk myself out of being allergic to the mystery purple stuff… I really am.  I woke up about 4:30am with my arms itching and on fire.  I now have a rash on both arms.  After coming to work and having my co-workers tell me what that silly plant that invades my flower bed was I googled it… Plainly says… May result in skin irritation.  It is a sensitizer.  What is a sensitizer you ask?  Well… instead of someone being DE-sensitized from exposure to something, it does the opposite.  The more you come in contact with it… the more you will react to it. 

Crap.     

Here's hoping I can keep this train on the tracks 9 more days...