Update After My Hiatus

I’ve been on a hiatus and think I should give an update on life. With nothing really going on I just haven’t found anything to write about. Of course things have happened, but they all seem so small and insignificant at the time that they don’t seem worth mentioning. It is only in the accumulation of seemingly insignificant changes that the scope of the change becomes apparent.

HOUSE PROJECT UPDATE

Things aren’t moving as quickly as I’d like, but they are moving about as quickly as they could possibly move. We finished the wiring/plumbing/etc last week; HVAC was installed last week, and the sheetrock was hung this week. The sheetrock mudders will be in on Monday. By the end of the week we should be able to paint.

While the sheetrock was going up this week we were working on the deck that is going out the south side of the great room (going to have to stop calling it that because now it is a collection of small rooms that are no greater than any other rooms). We have the supports up and joists up. We don’t have any decking or railing on yet. That might happen this week while the mudders have us out of the place again this week.

As soon as we can get back in we will paint just as quickly as possible and then get to finishing the bathroom and working on flooring.

I will try to get some video edited of what the space looks like out to you soon!

MISSOURI/FINANCES UPDATE

We have accepted (grudgingly) that we won’t be moving back to MO anytime soon. This is sad. We don’t want to lose the property though just in case we ever do find a way to get back there.

Even though we are way under water on the mortgage for a house that no longer exists, we have still been making the payments. I’ve tried reaching the bank to see if we can work something out but they refuse to speak to me. If nothing else I’d like to get approval to lower my payments since there is no insurance on the property (why would there be?) and the taxes are going to be MUCH lower now with no home.

We have sold our cattle. They have been at a neighbors house since the fire and he took care of them over the winter. I had him haul them to auction this week and should get a check for them soon. That will help out a lot of things!

We haven’t decided how/when we are going to collect the rest of our things. I think it is feasible to have everything loaded into my storage unit and then ship the entire thing here to Utah, but I don’t have a good way of getting it all loaded. I could ask friends/neighbors to do it for me, but that seems like a big ask. Maybe my Dad goes back and does it with help. May I have to do it? Still undecided.

FAMILY UPDATE

Everyone is fine. Caitlin (15) and Joshua (13) had birthdays. Everyone is healthy and enjoying the summer. They’d like to not be working at my parents so much, but it hasn’t been bad. With frequent (near daily) trips to the pool or the new splash pad in Bluffdale they are all getting out a lot. They’ve done some hiking and sports too.

I think everyone is apprehensive about the move. We know my parents place won’t be done. We only have 2 weeks from today, so I don’t even know what state of cleanliness it will be in. But school is starting, so we will move in regardless and make the best of it. Maybe with school starting it will help make things easier for Julie and I to get things into a more livable condition.

VA/MENTAL HEALTH UPDATE

I’m surviving. I’m still going to all my regular appointments (several a week) and getting by.

I have started and completed the beginners portion of Canines with a Cause. I still don’t have my own dog but have been working with their dogs. The first part of the intermediate class that begins in a few weeks will be looking for my own dog. The timing is working out fine since I couldn’t have my own here at the Penrod’s, but can have one as soon as we move. This will go a LONG way to helping my anxiety and will hopefully be beneficial in dealing with nightmares too.

Julie is still crazy!

EXERCISE/HEALTH UPDATE

You haven’t seen any running logs since the pool opened because we stopped running. We have instead been swimming. I have the kids do laps each time we show up to keep them doing some cardio, then they are free to go play (which rarely includes actual swimming).

My exercise has been fine, but hasn’t resulted in any weight loss. I think it has trimmed up my waist a little bit (several people have mentioned it), but my actual weight hasn’t gone down. Perhaps with time.

28 June 2017

Insurance Update:

I promised an insurance update last week and never got to it. I can’t say I’m much more prepared this week to do it either. My mental state just isn’t good I’m afraid.

Insurance Update:

But just so you don’t feel like I’ve left you hanging, we have officially been denied coverage for the fire. Maybe later this week or next I’ll be able to write about what this means and what we plan to do. Thanks for understanding the lack of info at this time.

22 May 201721 May 2017

Bad Days

You’ve had bad days, right?

Yeah, Me Too!

I have them often, either because of the Mental Health issues or the never-ending chronic pain problems. I won’t dare say that I have more bad days than most, but I have plenty of them. So if you find yourself wondering why I haven’t posted anything in a few days, it is because I’ve strung a few less than stellar days together.

So please just keep us in your prayers. We’ll keep you abreast of what we’re doing just as soon as possible.

Thanks for everybody’s love and support.

Enjoy the picture of Andrew playing at the park a few weeks ago!

Andrew was not having a bad day while he played on the monkey bars!

11 May 201711 May 2017

Only 8? Or am I dreaming?

I still only have 8 kids, right?

Had an incredibly vivid dream last night. The length of the time span involved seems insanely long. It began with us living in the house in Myrtle, MO. I came home from a trip to Little Rock and found all of the kids gone. When I entered the house I heard Julie screaming in fear and pain. I ran into the bedroom to find a guy on top of her, in the process of raping her.

With just a moment to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing, decided I couldn’t use my sidearm with Julie there, so I jumped on the guy and a fight ensued. It wasn’t very long until I had him in a choke hold, which I held until I was sure the guy was dead.

The dream skipped the dealing with the clean up of that event; no dealing with police, hospital, etc. However, a few weeks later we found out Julie was pregnant.

Pregnancy

The pregnancy was what this dream was really about. I was dealing with my wife being pregnant from a rapist and making decision on how to deal with it. My sympathies to anyone and everyone who has had to do this in reality.

The majority of the dream was the discussion and decision making Julie and I went through. We seemed to have several discussions about giving the kids up for adoption or whether we would raise it. We didn’t discuss the idea of an abortion. They weren’t fights, with one of us wanting to get rid of it and the other wanting to keep it. They were discussions with both of us discussing things like whether we would resent the kid because of how he was conceived, how the other kids would treat him, how other family would react, and whether we thought we could love him, etc. (We knew it was a boy somehow???).

So my brain spent the majority of the night discussing with itself the merits of keeping a kid conceived by rape. I suppose the benefit of such a dream is that it makes the decision real, it adds the feeling of being an actual decision needing to be made. A theoretical discussion would cover the same topics, but without the real emotions involved.

Decision

And for what its worth, my brain decided that we’d keep such a kid. If it were reality I don’t know if we’d make that decision. Obviously Julie’s real emotions/reasoning would be different than what my dream created for her. I assume my thoughts and emotions would be the same, because I thought it was real this time. Hopefully we’ll never have to find out Julie’s real-world thoughts on it.

Would you keep a kid conceived by rape? Do you think you’d be able to ever love the kid? and not look at him with resentment or anger? In my dream I thought I could, but I don’t know if I’d really be able to. I think I’d want to keep the kid, but I think it’d be harder to KNOW that your emotions would be positive toward it.

Dream and Reality collide

I’ve said before how I can have a hard time telling the difference between the real and the imagined. In my dream we had gone through the fire and moved here to PG, just like we really did. So my dream concluded with us living here like we really are, only Julie had just had the baby.

As I woke up I reached over to find Julie and she wasn’t in bed. So I thought she must be up feeding the new and fictitious baby. I laid there for a good 30 minutes thinking about the kid and dealing with my emotions about him (I think we named him John). After at least a half an hour it started to dawn on me that it wasn’t real. That I still only had 8 kids. That those memories were of non-real events. That is hard to accept sometimes because the emotions going through me were very real.

After stretching out my back and shoulders (often required to stand up) I got up and out of bed. When I got to the staircase it fully hit me that it wasn’t real. JR was at the bottom of the stairs and seeing him confirmed it was just a dream. I remembered that just yesterday I had known that JR was the youngest.

Conclusions…

You mean other than that I’m psychotic???

Yes, I’d consciously kill a violent rapist I caught in the act.

Yes, I’d be willing to keep a kid conceived like that.

Yes, my medication should probably be working better.