Oh my. What is a passionate rose lover like you doing in that glacial hell hole? Reading about your endeavors has exhausted me and I haven't even lifted a shovel. I admire your grit and determination, but would love to see you rewarded with thousands of blooms on your rose bushes for all your hard work. I bet they could use engineers in zones 7 to 10!

I'm a little baffled at how you know what she's going to do at her doctor appointment. T.M.I. Anyway, it is her problem how she is going to get him on her weeks when he goes back to school. Just like her phone didn't work, she didn't answer it, whatever.... that can go both ways. If she gets a hold of your DH & he's at work, he needs to be able to tell her ~ "sorry LH is busy & can't do it... you said you'd take care of it so you need to figure it out!" otherwise she will just continue to screw up and expect you & your DH to take care of it. Your DH should probably also tell her that since she doesn't keep her word on agreements or when making exceptions to the order, that unfortunately he will not be able to stray from the order, even if it's a special occasion. He can say he'd love to be able to do that, but if it's only going to be one sided or if she is going to change the plan after she's gotten what she wants, then he can't do it anymore... SORRY! and if it comes down to she has no way to get SS on a regular basis & you do go get him, I'd bring him home & tell her that she can come get him when her DH gets home. I would NOT drive SS to her.. then there is NO incentive for her to make a plan.. the plan will be to let y'all do it... and sit there waiting for you to bring her son to her. and if she's like the crazies in my life, she'd b/tch about how you did it or that you took too long. (is my frustration showing much? lol) If it's an ongoing problem for her to pick up her son, maybe think about changing him to a school closer to your house. If you went to court, the Judge would either give her primary custody & let him go to school near her or give your DH custody & let him go to school near him... or worse case, the Judge could order your DH to transport all the time, which I would think is completely unfair but you never know what will happen when you go to court.

Thanks Mattie. I am trying to trust that I'm on the right path, and things will be brighter ahead, no matter what. There is no doubt in my doctor's mind that the stress of the last few years has brought a lot of *my issues* to the forefront. BUT a lot of MY issues are also the reason I've accepted such a crap situation. KWIM? I can recognize now the damage the unending stress resulting from the BM situation has brought. But I have to accept some responsibility in it, too. People treat you how you let them treat you. I can't control BM's behavior but I CAN expect---even demand---that my DH treat me with respect. And while he does in other areas, he does NOT in the situation pertaining to BM. DH loves me, cares for me, no doubt. But he's got his own issues to work on, and I think THAt is why my psych. encouraged DH to get into individual therapy for himself. My doctor told me that, going through therapy, I will be fundamentally CHANGED for the better, and it's productive if BOTH partners can change simultaneously. At the very least, as I get stronger and put emotional pain in the past, I will be able to make capable, GOOD choices. Or at least that is the fervent hope. The silver lining--I started a blog detailing my therapy journey and a good friend of mine who reads it forwarded some of the material to a publisher friend of HERS. As a result--I scored a paid writing gig! WOOHOO. It's something aimed at teenage girls, and I will be published, have my name on a book, etc. No royalties, but this is a great, exciting step for me. I love to write, and I know that this one time job opens doors to other opportunities in the future. Writing has always been my passion and it's awesome that therapy has forced me to *hone my craft.* I do believe in God and that things work out as He intends. If I look back over my life, I can see a bigger, greater plan at work. Sometimes it's just so hard to see in the middle of it! "My concern is purely for your SAFETY and Happiness above all. Cause I think you are a really kind & caring person and deserve to be treated as such." Thanks Cat, that was so kind of you to say. I meant to thank you earlier, you are so sweet. :) I am so glad you are in a happier place now! I know you went through so much crap! (((HUGS)))

Terence McKenna Quotes American - Writer November 16, 1946 - April 3, 2000 The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere. Terence McKenna Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. Terence McKenna We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. Terence McKenna That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with. Terence McKenna Nature conserves, prefers novelty. Terence McKenna What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us. Terence McKenna There are times when everything seems to go right, and times when everything seems to go wrong. Terence McKenna History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness. Terence McKenna I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on. Terence McKenna Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind. Terence McKenna The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with. Terence McKenna In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types. Terence McKenna William Kent Krueger Quotes American - Author Born: November 16, 1950 Readers anticipate that a significant element of every story will be additional exposure to the ways of the Ojibwe. The truth is that I enjoy this aspect of the work. Although I have no Indian blood running through my veins, in college I prepared to be a cultural anthropologist, so exploring other cultures is exciting to me. William Kent Krueger Write because you love the work, not because of what might come from it. The journey is the purpose. Very Zen-like, I know, but honest to God it's the truth. And I have never had to deal with writer's block. Knock on wood. William Kent Krueger When you're a writer, you're always looking for conflict. It's conflict that drives great stories. William Kent Krueger 'Ordinary Grace' freed me. I don't have to write only Cork O'Connor novels now. I'm liberated. I can write whatever I want to write. William Kent Krueger I think that whether we acknowledge it or not, our opinions as authors always influence our work. How can they not? William Kent Krueger I don't know any real billionaires. William Kent Krueger Robin McKinley Quotes American - Author Born: November 16, 1952 I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on. Robin McKinley I get a little cranky with the whole business about kids not having attention spans. This reminds me of the usual business of thinking that the next generation is hopeless. Every generation has said that about every younger generation. Robin McKinley I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly. Robin McKinley What I write, if you have to label it, is crossover, and I think that much of the stuff that is called children's or YA is in fact crossover and is equally valid for anyone who likes to read fantasy. Robin McKinley Andrea Barrett Quotes American - Novelist Born: November 16, 1954 There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write. Andrea Barrett The cure until the late 1940s, when there was an antibiotic discovered for tuberculosis, was basically rest. It was fresh, cold air, lots of food - five meals a day, lots of sleep, not very much talking, and for some people, complete stillness. Andrea Barrett Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer. Andrea Barrett By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English teacher, and I would go to school just for her class and then skip out afterwards. That's actually when I started writing, although I didn't think of it then as something I might someday do. Andrea Barrett I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us. Andrea Barrett In the story I eventually called 'Archangel' and published in 2008, Eudora MacEachern, working as an assistant to a surgeon at a hospital in Archangel, one night finds outside the gates an exhausted and frostbitten soldier crouched over the reins of a pony sleigh carrying the body of another soldier. Andrea Barrett For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation. Andrea Barrett My mother was largely a housewife until she and my father were divorced. No one in the family read for pleasure - it was a very unintellectual household - but my mother did read to us when we were little, and that's how I started to read. Andrea Barrett I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person. Andrea Barrett Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I've been really lucky to know her. She's a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer. Andrea Barrett I wanted to be a scientist. My undergraduate degree is in biology, and I really did think I might go off and be some kind of a lady Darwin someplace. It turned out that I'm really awful at science and that I have no gift for actually doing science myself. But I'm very interested in others who practice science and in the stories of science. Andrea Barrett The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It's very exciting. Andrea Barrett I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers or scientists. It's a trait of human nature that I'm particularly in touch with. So I tend to project it onto my characters. Andrea Barrett I've never been to a black-tie thing in my life. I didn't even go to my prom. Andrea Barrett I grew up on Cape Cod. We didn't live right on the water, but I could walk to it and did every day. Andrea Barrett I think the landscape you grow up in probably does mark you in ways you don't even understand. Andrea Barrett I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world. Andrea Barrett When I'm sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material. Andrea Barrett All my life, books have felt alive; some more so than people, or rather, some people. Alive - this has to do with me, I know, and not the books - in a way that some people aren't. Alive as teachers, alive as minds, alive as imaginative triggers. Andrea Barrett Sheryl WuDunn Quotes American - Businesswoman Born: November 16, 1959 People want to be happy, so they don't want to feel as though they're mired in this world of ugliness. I think that if people can recognize that you can actually help and change that ugliness, then you'll feel a lot better about yourself as well, and that does create a certain amount of happiness. Sheryl WuDunn If you economically empower a woman, she represents enormous opportunity that can actually be transformative not only for her family and for her community, but at the aggregate level for the economy. Sheryl WuDunn If something is really outrageous, it doesn't matter if it is one culture, or another, it's outrageous. Sheryl WuDunn Kate Thompson Quotes Irish - Author Born: November 16, 1959 The powerlessness of the child is often forgotten. And after it comes the terrifying phase of moving into adulthood. Kate Thompson You know yourself, once you've had the excitement of riding thoroughbreds, it's not very interesting riding anything else. But I still love horses; I just don't have one any more. Kate Thompson If there's a common thread to my books, it is that each involves an individual's journey. The individual must stay true to themselves. Kate Thompson Writers want publicity all the time, and they are always nagging their agents and publishers to give them more publicity, but, when you get it, it's kind of soul-destroying. Kate Thompson I've always felt a bit hard done by in England - you know, I've won the Bisto three times in Ireland, but it has felt like nobody has even heard of me in my home country. Kate Thompson My mum wouldn't have had any time for fantasy stuff; she's more practical. Kate Thompson I always had an awful lot going on in my head, always telling myself stories, very vivid imagination. Kate Thompson I am political. But not politically active. I'm not my dad. I'll never write polemic, as he did. Kate Thompson There's only one set of books I've written that I knew was going to be more than one book at the beginning, and those are the 'Missing Link' books. Kate Thompson I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers' Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library. Kate Thompson What I tend to get from America is very enthusiastic letters and e-mail from librarians and schoolteachers, the gatekeepers, though I hesitate to use that word. I've never been a huge seller. Kate Thompson What I do find enormously gratifying is the reviews my books get from the American press. They are so on the ball compared to anywhere else. It's so satisfying to get a review that conveys the reader understood precisely what I was trying to get at. Kate Thompson Irish mythology is gorgeous, and so are the fairies, but they are very misrepresented in the U.K. They are not little creatures with wings. Kate Thompson Children in their young teens are just moving into the moment when they are most receptive to philosophy and psychology. You can explore these things in stories and, in doing so, give them power and control. Kate Thompson My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry. Kate Thompson I had thought about becoming a civil rights lawyer, but I gave it up. Kate Thompson I wasn't that bothered with school; I was too mad into horses. But I liked reading and was good enough at English and always liked music. Kate Thompson I found it really hard for a couple of years to do any writing because all I wanted to do was play the fiddle. From the minute I took it up, I just couldn't put it down. Kate Thompson I find it very difficult to say no when I'm in Ireland. You do end up going around doing lots of events and things and not getting work done, and it's not just a question of having hours at the desk. Kate Thompson If I have one thing on in a week, I find it very difficult to get back to work that week. I need a lot of dreaming time. Kate Thompson