it’s been a rough past couple almost three weeks here. The strain is amplified by the fact I have not slept well in weeks. First it was Chloe getting a cold…that’s minor so I took that in stride. I still sleep much more lightly when someone in the house isn’t feeling well..but this was not an unable to sleep issue. Alessa then caught the cold and it triggered her latent Asthma(my term for it). hers is not the sudden, acute unable to breathe but it sets in gradually over the course of days to weeks. Only when it gets to the point where she is out of breath going up the stairs does it get noticed….for me I noticed it the night before because she got her Athsma cough(my term again). This was Friday night…while her breathing wasn’t critical something needed to be done. Luckily I ALWAYS have some psudeoephidrine based decongestants around(to help with my minor issues..which i have not had in years). She took one of these every 12 hours until we got the appointment setup. Luckily the pseduoephedrine stabilized her until Monday morning when I had the appointment setup. We get to the doctors and yep the cold has triggered her asthma. She is now back on a nebulizer 5x a day plus she had two other prescriptions. If i had to pay this out of pocket it would have been north of $1000. Luckily her mother recently got Alessa on her work insurance..out of pocket was only a couple hundred…which i covered. Next, once Alessa was under treatment and Chloe was well I thought I could relax a little. I went downstairs into the basement to run test my oil furnace. i do this every year to make sure the until is working properly. I know how it sounds when operating normally and i know how it should feel in terms of the outgoing air. When i fired it up the flame sounded like a steam engine(Huff huff huff) and i started smelling exhaust. I immediately forced the system back to heat pump and called for service. Because we were stil in the temperature range where the heat pump could properly operate I didn’t need service on that Saturday night..so they came on Monday. For me…knowing I had a potentially deadly furnace downstairs made me uneasy again….but I have another backup in case..some of the rooms in the house have electric baseboard heat. Monday comes…the technician had to replace the tip and reset the air/feul mixture settings. Ok…done right? Nopers. I then noticed OJ was loosing fur…we got him to the vet and the diagnosis was a flea bite allergy. How the hell did fleas get in? So we get the prescriptions from the vet and get OJ and Freya treated…6 hours later Freya has a very bad reaction to the treatment which necessitated an emergency run back to the vet. It turns out some cats can react badly to the treatment(called revolution)..the reversal is quick and Freya got a bath(much to her displeasure). IN the course of one day me and my daughter combined spent more than $500 on the animals to keep them safe…now money is at nearly zero for me and zero for her. I am tired, no exhausted and tonight I cna FINALLY look for a good night’s sleep. Luckily the Lord has given us some good news…Alessa may have found another job with good pay and reasonable hours. I have two more big jobs I am working on and my remote gig is going strong. One thing I never lost was my faith in Jesus and his ability to see me through. Footprints in the sane…at one point i was so tired I just slept for the day…and nothing bothered me. I am still tired but now I can sleep well knowing that Jesus saw me through everything and HE is providing for us..as he always does.
I posted this here so I could embed this video…I didn’t want to go into Facebook jal; for posting something that is readily available on youtube…:)