When life hands you lemons, you either cry or make lemonade
and make lemonade we (hubby and I) did!

I posted last week about taking some time off the forum to
deal with “some stuff”. Well that “stuff” included my MIL leaving the doors
open to my house causing the escape of my kitty cats (luckily they appeared to
be too terrified to go anywhere); MIL falling asleep with a burning cigarette
in her mouth (despite the no smoking in the house rule) and burning a hole in
her bed, never mind our fear of her burning the house down; and our one and
only vehicle completely dying (transmission, alternator, battery and electrical
system died all at once) at a cost to repair double what the car is worth. So I
needed to take a breath and re-boot.

In the last week hubby and I have: arranged for Home Care
visits three times per week to check on MIL; installed Victoria Life Line for
MIL’s safety; installed hyper sensitive smoke detectors throughout the house
(both for safety and the insistence that she stop smoking in the house); taken
her to see a lovely Assisted Living apartment she truly was pleased with and
got her on the waiting list; gone to the bank and arranged for a car loan and
done some debt consolidation at the same time; bought a new (used but new to
us) car; had our old car towed to a scrap yard for parts. All of this while
still working. Oh yeah…and cleaned 15 years’ worth of crap out of our garage!

We now feel better about MIL’s safety (and ours) and have a
plan in place for now and the future, and for the first time EVER, have what we
are considering a “sexy” car. We’ve always purchased the completely practical
and economical type vehicle but now that we don’t need to haul our own garbage
from when we lived in the country or have a baby car seat in the back, we went
with something sporty with bells and whistles. And we’ve decided we deserve it!

We also took the opportunity to really examine our finances
and although the emergency car purchase has put us behind in our dream of
moving, we have done some other juggling that makes us a bit more comfortable
month to month. I will be slowing down my shopping significantly but that’s ok
too – I’m in a good place with that.

I’ll be back on the forum next week and thank you all for
your support