Feeling 'Listy'

I'm again feeling like it's a list kind of day. So here's what I have on my mind...literally, point by point..

1. Why must both of our next door neighbors be idiots and leave us in a crappy situation. One of them up and moved out of their house this Spring. One day we saw a U-Haul, then never saw them again.  We later learned they foreclosed on their home and it has been left for months with no action from the bank until just this month. This means their house looks like crap and has for many, many months. There are weeds everywhere, bushes and plants are half dead, and now tons and tons of different kinds of workers are at the house daily to repair it, clean it, and finally mow the lawn but with a weed eater that sprays all of their weed clippings and trash all over our yard!

Our other next door neighbor moved to Houston TWO YEARS AGO. They leased the house out to one tenant for a short time about a year ago but other than that the house has been abandoned. Yes, the owner is still paying the mortgage, but no one has lived there is ages. What does this mean...see above. We spend a lot of money on our yard to keep it very well groomed and weed-free. This is kinda difficult when you live on a postage stamp lot and you have two weed ridden yards on either side just waiting to take over your lawn! Yes, we have the exact same problem on both sides. I have contacted the City and the Home Owners Association on many occasions. Neither can offer any help or give me any info. This infuriates us. We pay $500 a year to a HOA for them not to be able to do anything. Awesome. We are praying for new, great neighbors...soon!

2. Our dogs are pushing me over the edge..well, at least their ailments are. Glory's laceration is infected. Why is it infected? Because despite her wearing a t-shirt day and night and being on antibiotics, when she is put up in her crate every night to sleep she licks her wound through the shirt, which has caused a nasty infection. What does this mean? This means that her wound has opened up, it bleeds through her t-shirt and gets all over things, she now has to wear an e-collar which causes her to crash into every door jam and wall corner, and this also means that she REFUSES to sleep in her crate without almost choking herself to pull the e-collar off of her head so she can lick her wound. After many options explored and attempted, the only one that remotely works is to have her sleep on our bed with the e-collar in place. This means I get no sleep because she is crowding my foot space and/or hitting me with the plastic cone on her head. Ready for this dang thing to heal.

We also found a mass under Kelsey's chin that periodically opens and bleeds on a whim. The mass itself is not of any concern, we think, according to the vet, but the random bleeding has left me a lot to clean. She loves to lay in our bed. Well, she has smeared blood all over our dry clean-only comforter a couple of times, on the sides of our new couch, and her dog bed. So I have to hand clean all of these spots....over and over and over again. I have tried covering the mass with everything I know of and nothing will stick to her hair/chin. Our bed is now protected just in case she slips into our bedroom, but we now have our bedroom off limits to her. But we're still on constant 'checkin for blood' patrol. Not fun.

3. I have finalized our baby shower and baby announcement list/addresses. Baby shower invites will be worked on sometime in January, but I wasn't sure how long it would take me to hunt down addresses, so I went ahead and got them all done. Feels good! I hate doing admin. stuff like this.

4. I have one pair of 'normal' jeans that I can wear. That's it.  I tried on every pair of pants in my second closet that contains all my 'larger Kristen' clothes and none of them fit. So it looks like it's off for some maternity pants in the very near future. But at 24 weeks, I think this is pretty good.

That's what I have for now...