Tax man arrives with hope for resuming house construction

The tax man has cometh. Most people want to hide from him, but Jim and I have been waiting expectantly for his arrival. I've alluded before to a plan we were following to resume house construction. For the past several years we'd been looking at something significant with the power to impact our financial health, but did not count on anything until it happened. Now with the tax man's arrival, it has, and I can share.

Roofing is a tough industry in New England because it's a three-season job. It's difficult for a family to live on a roofer's income when he's just the worker and has no income in the winter, 4-5 months of the year, so these past fifteen years have been very tight financially. It's why we're living in a tiny mobile home and could not afford a normal mortgage or rent or car payments. (Not that we want them anyway...) But we knew there was hope on the horizon because my dad talked of giving Jim the business.

This past year was the first year Jim and Dad were business partners. We had no idea what our finances would look like until the tax man arrived, and we kept things strung tight the entire year not knowing how the winter would be without unemployment or income and still having to pay quarterly taxes. It looks like we've done OK and will continue to as long as we mind our budget.

We are now be able to pay ourselves a small mortgage to put into building supplies, so work should resume this year. I can't tell you how happy and relieved this makes me. When you sit in tiny hole year round looking at your unfinished house untouched for the second year in a row, it gets depressing, especially when you can't see a way to change things.

I'm grateful to God for supplying our needs through good old fashioned hard work, and for helping us hang on and be faithful to roofing when God asked us to even before talk of ownership began. That's the toughest part of faith--following what God asks when you can't see any logical reason for it. It borders on lunacy, and would be if not orchestrated by God. (All the more reason to know God to discern His direction.)

So we'll keep budgeting and start building up house funds, and hopefully we'll be back in that house pounding nails soon. Yippee!

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Tech Tags: taxes roofing house construction budgeting mortgage building DIY

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Slip Sliding Away

I awoke to my 13-year old asking if school was canceled. Freezing rain had made our road sheer ice and it was raining. He'd tried to catch the bus, but he fell several times along the way. By the time he got to the bus stop, the bus had come and gone.

IJ, CJ, an SM piled into the car and off we went in first gear, sliding in every direction. The car skated down the hill despite brakes. I dropped off IJ's brother and sister for early jump rope practice and then hauled him to the next town over to middle school. Roads were fine.

Upon return, halfway back up the hill the car got stuck and I realized I had made a huge mistake in leaving NT home the first trip out. I walked home to get kindergartener NT. I wished I had ice skates.

NT and I walked gingerly back to the car, spreading dirt ahead of us from a bucket with a cup I had filled at our dirt hill that came from digging the house's recessed first floor. I never realized three gallons of dirt weighed so much. My arms ached under the load as I tried to step carefully on the watery ice.

We reached the car and buckled up. Reverse. Sliding. Brake. Dumb, Brandy.

The car fishtailed into the bank and stuck caddy corner across the road. Good thing I had called the school before we left home and told them NT would be late.

No dirt left, I grabbed my bucket and retrieved some from the bin fifteen feet back up the hill Jim had put there during our first winter there.

On the way back, I fell on my butt and slid ten feet toward the car, stopping just short of the front corner. NT watched from the back passenger window. Cold wet pants clung to my backside. Ew. But I wasn't hurt.

Thank God for gloves, and cell phones. Dirt under our studded snow tires failed to get our Kia Spectra out so I called home for help. Jim would drive down with the tractor.

I wondered if it would slide into the car and what would happen if it did. My imagination supplied a few ideas. Best not to remain in the car. I decided to walk NT to Kindergarten, usually 10-minute walk from that point.

Dumb move. The bottom of the hill was more dangerous that the top. It took five minutes to cross a seven foot section. We would be better off trekking home through the snow beside the road.

As I contemplated the idea, the tractor inched toward the car. Even with chains, it almost slid into the car. Glad we weren't still in it.

Our neighbor came home as I wondered what to do and he offered to drive NT and I to school. By the time we returned, the car was at the bottom of the hill ready to go to Wal-Mart, and Jim had spread sand. I hoped the ice would melt in the day's unusual warmth while I was gone.

And that began my first two hours of the day.

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Technorati Tags: family ^ parenting ^ kids ^ ice ^ slippery road ^ hazardous driving conditions

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Thyroid Tumor Results

Just found out this afternoon. My thyroid tumor is benign with no trace of pre-cancerous cells.

YAAAAAAAAYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Answered prayer! REJOICE!

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Technorati Tags: health ^ thyroid tumor ^ results

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Devastating Vehicle Accidents Today

My heart is breaking today.

On the news, I saw that an eight-year-old girl was seriously injured this morning in a nearby town when an 86-year-old man lost control of his vehicle after dropping off his wife for Super Tuesday voting. His vehicle pinned the second grader to the outside wall of her elementary school. Worse, her classmates saw it and are coping today with the fear and worry for their friend.

Everyone, including the man, must also be devastated. According to reports, his gas pedal stuck. If he were wearing clunky boots, that can happen easily.

And then Jim calls me from travel on the interstate this afternoon. (Slushy ice storm last night made roads a mess today.) A tractor trailer truck lost control of his truck this morning, hit guard rails on a bridge, and part or all of it went over. I don't know if his truck first dangled on the edge allowing him to escape before he plummeted to the street below. If he was unable to escape, he is certainly dead.

(Update: Jim just came home with reports from someone who lived nearby who said he heard the man screaming for help, but no one could reach him before he burned to death.)

I just passed that intersection last night on the way home from errands and recalled a dream I'd had as a young girl where I drove off the bridge to visit a friendly monster at the bottom of a whirlpool. As I drove by (it was a different section of the Interstate), I prayed God would never let my vehicle go over the side because it would be instant (hopefully) death. I feel like kicking myself. Why didn't I pray that God not allow any vehicle to go over at any bridge of the highway. Did I? I might have. And if I had, would it have made a difference?

How was I to know that very thing would happen the next morning--today? I feel awful. Awful for the driver, awful for the girl and her family and friends and school, awful for the elderly couple. I know none of it is my fault, and I could not have foreseen the bridge accident today on my own, but it still hurts to see such pain and torment. And I feel like I should have taken the memory more seriously than just a recall and prayed harder.

All I can do now is pray and hope.

Funny how prayer seems so helpless sometimes. I know its the best thing we can do in all circumstances, but it's so hard to do only that when we want to rush out and fix things ourselves. We have to submit our concerns, worries, and fears to God and trust that He hears us, listens to our requests, sees our requests as valid and important, and will act. And then we have to trust God's response and timing in His response.

How much easier it is to do things ourselves. But we can't. Even when we can, God still asks us to pray and trust Him alongside what we can and should do to help. How hard. But how important.

God does move in response to our prayers. I can only hope He will do a miracle in this little girl's body today.

Please pray for these people.

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Technorati Tags: tragedy ^ accident ^ kids ^ vehicle ^ prayer

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BYB Sunday: Thyroid Tumor Biopsy & Treatment

Welcome to Blog Your Blessings Sunday.

Continued from What Caused My Enlarged Thyroid?

When I finally got to the biopsy appointment I was sporting a mild fever and felt crummy. I snoozed forty-five minutes as best I could with shivers before I finally was called to the procedure room. The doctor came in and recounted what I already knew about the thyroid mass.

"Not all tumors are cancerous," he said.

Wait. I had a tumor? I thought I had a goiter. But then I understood they were the same. Hearing the word tumor suddenly made things very clear. I had a serious condition, and according to the doctor, a tumor is not caused by iodine deficiency. That blew all my hope of a peaceful resolution, especially when he said they begin to look at biopsying when tumors reach 1-2 cm. At over 4 cm, mine needed biopsy, no question. And it was large enough to biopsy in the office without the assistance of ultra sound.

The doc laid out my chair, put a towel under my neck, and had me lay my head back. Jim says the lump in my neck really looked huge then. My doc injected lidocaine into my thyroid, once shallow, which burned some, and once deeper which hurt more. Then he took a needle that would section out small cylinders of my thyroid, went in from the center of my thyroid and moved it in and out toward my left ear sucking out cells like a liposuction surgeon at work. I felt movement, but not much pain. He repeated the procedure, going deeper. I winced. When done, my left ear ached from displaced pain.

Then I had to wait three weeks for a follow up appointment. Three weeks for biopsy results. By this time, it was January.

Maybe other people would have been banging down the door for biopsy results, but I was like I had been when nine months pregnant with my first child--content to remain in waiting because it didn't require more effort.

I finally made it back to the doctor the forth week in January. I expected that if the result was negative for thyroid cancer he would give me a list of options including watching it to see if it shrunk, which I had been praying for and expected, giving me thyroid medicine to shrink it, or a last resort of surgery.

"There are four types of thyroid cancer," he began when he came in. He listed one and said, "You don't have that." Another. "You don't have that." Another. "You don't have that." And then he said, "the cells in the tumor are follicular," and explained that the thyroid consists of follicular cells like what hair grows out of, only in the center of the follicle is pools of thyroid hormone. My tumor was a mass of the material that makes the holes, but missing the pools.

There was 15-20% chance it was cancer, maybe 25% chance because of its size. But the biopsy alone could not tell. The only way to know for sure what it was, was to remove and dissect it.

He urged me to have the removal surgery. The tumor was simply too big for him to feel comfortable watching, and with the vocal nerve behind it, waiting could only make later removal more difficult or cause me to lose my voice. Surgery would entail removing the entire left lobe since the tumor was so big it filled the whole lobe.

Tears came to my eyes but I tried not to heed them. What happened to several options and trying synthetic hormone? Jim questioned the kind of cells it was and confirmed that if cancerous, it was the kind that could spread through my blood stream to other parts of my body.

The doctor left to give Jim and I a few moments to discuss things. I knew as he walked out what Jim was already thinking. And I agreed. There was only one way to go.

I walked out of the appointment with a surgery date for the following week (this past Tuesday). On my way to the hospital for blood work I prayed if it was the right decision. I felt immediate assurance that it was. Peace settled in my soul alongside the grief I felt for having to go through surgery I didn't want. As long as I was in God's will, I could go forward with confidence.

My blessing this Blog Your Blessing Sunday is that the thyroid tumor is now out and the preliminary results of it taken during surgery came back benign. Stitches and the final pathology report comes this Tuesday afternoon, February 5. In the mean time, I'm enduring recovering with deep gratitude for God's loving care and letting my enlarged thyroid be found before it got bigger.

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Technorati Tags: thyroid ^ tumor ^ cancer ^ enlarged thyroid ^ treatment ^ diagnosis

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What Caused My Enlarged Thyroid?

Continued from The Beginning of the End--or the Beginning?

So off to my regular doctor I went for him to evaluate my enlarged thyroid lobe. He said I could have thyroid disease where it secreted too much or too little thyroid hormone at which I'd take synthetic thyroid meds for the rest of my life. And it could have been caused by iodine deficiency.

That must be it, I thought, rejecting the repugnant sentence of taking synthetic medicine for the rest of my life when my body should be able to produce it naturally. (I'm a whole foods, natural meds if possible kind of gal.) I had ignorantly bought iodine-free salt and never ate foods containing iodine. That was the only good option there was, so I clung to that, ignored the glossed over, briefly mentioned fact that though rare, it could be thyroid cancer, and went out and bought high-in-iodine kelp sprinkles at the local health food store--after I got my doctor-ordered blood work to test my thyroid hormone levels.

A week I returned for the blood results. The TSH test that measures what the pituitary gland is calling for from the thyroid returned smack in the normal range of hormone production. My doc suggested that it may be struggling to do so because of whatever was causing the enlargement, but one thing was clear. I needed an ultrasound to investigate the size and cause of the enlargement.

His office made an appointment with my hospital that week and a follow up appointment about a week after that.

Ultrasound techs must have one of the most frustrating jobs. They know what they see when they measure and take pictures of the snowy images on their monitors, but they must by hospital policy feign ignorance. I'll never be a hospital ultrasound technician.

At my follow up appointment, I learned I had a mass 1.5 cm by 4.3 cm in my thyroid--HUGE--that had blood vessels going through it. Drat. That meant it wasn't a cyst. It was what was called a thyroid goiter, informed my doctor, and they are common.

Well, not to me! Particularly not when he mentioned the next step: biopsy.

His office scheduled a biopsy with an Ears, Nose, Throat specialist in a week and a half. And I knew the end of the world was afoot...

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Tags: thyroid ^ enlarged ^ goiter ^ ultrasound ^ health ^ disease ^ biopsy

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The Beginning of the End--or the Beginning?

The past few months have been very trying as my sparse and sometimes virulent posts of late testify. Wise readers understand that most bloggers do not expose everything about themselves and their lives publicly, and even though I have shared transparently in many instances, I have not divulged everything.

Nor should I. No blogger should. But now that I've walked through the majority of the past two months and appear to be near an end of very trying times, I feel able to share something of what's been happening the past three months.

In November I went for my annual checkup with my gynecologist. Other than feeling fatigued and mentally unplugged as I had been feeling the previous two years, I felt mostly normal and thought I just needed more sleep. And then the midwife felt my neck and discovered a lump. The left lobe of my thyroid was large. Very large.

My stomach sunk and despite attempts to keep my emotions at bay, my nerves flew away as water through fingers. The last thing I expected from a gynecological checkup was finding something wrong with a general part of my body. My stable life mentally exploded.

Somehow, no one had noticed the large lump in my neck that I suddenly realized was clearly visible at a glance.

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Technorati Tags: blogger ^ health problems ^ health checkup ^ thryoid ^ medical

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Surrender Miracle, part 2

-continued from yesterday's post, Surrender Miracle, part 1-

I pushed the button and left to do something. When I came back, the password window was up. I couldn't believe it. Before that it wouldn't let us get to the password window, system bios, or safe mode at all, just circle in a failed boot cycle. I entered my password and it booted up completely. I broke down in tears.

Several system scans later revealed a trojan horse infecting the system including embedded files in system restore. We should not have been able to get back in. I don't care what skeptics say, that was a direct answer to prayer--a miracle that came only after I surrendered to God.

The first thing I did was retrieve the scholarship applicant contact info, but something more happened.

To match applicants to their applications, I asked them to resend. Someone sent me one that matched none of the stripped applications. I wondered if she misunderstood and thought I would accept more applications, but I learned she had sent it during the entry period and it either never reached me or was accidentally deleted. If computer problems had not happened, I never would have known it. God must have wanted her application read.

Fortunately, we were able to put it back into the mix and hold a second round of judging. And that second round turned out to be needed to make a clear determination for all of them.

Through all of this, I've concluded that no experience, good or bad, goes unused for God's glory. One way or the other, God will be glorified, and it's up to us to determine what part we want to have in that glorification. Thanks be to God, He allows us to acknowledge ours sins and correct our paths.

Someone say amen!

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Technorati Tags: rebellion ^ attitude ^ sin ^ Christian ^ writer ^ computer ^ crash ^ story ^ surrender ^ miracle

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Surrender Miracle, part 1

All right, now where was I before my horrendous attitude hit? Ah yes, computer crash, sick--that stuff.

I was rebelling against God for everything that He was allowing in my life. One day last week I got sick of being miserable, and had to admit it wasn't changing a thing. God had given, and God had taken away, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't make my health better and I couldn't fix my computer. All I could do was work with what I had left.

But it wasn't enough. Anonymous writing scholarship applications to attend the Colorado Christian Writers Conference sat with judges and I couldn't identify the winners once they chose them without the file off my computer. In my rush to help Jim make his tax deadline, I had forgotten to print it. If God wanted to take my photos and writing and not give them back, that was fine, but the scholarship applications were for others. And an appeal for applicants to resend their applications left half unidentified. I needed help and didn't know what to do.

Still, it was better to handle the mess without the foul mood, so I surrendered to God. With nothing left in me, I quietly asked, "Please, will you let me back into my computer to retrieve my files?"

I left my room for the computer to pull my wireless keyboard and mouse to put on the slow Mac to at least have familiar equipment to work on. Something nudged me to first turn on the main computer one more time to see if it would start even though it had sat untended for five days without a way to apply any solution...

-to be continued-

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Technorati Tags: rebellion ^ attitude ^ sin ^ Christian ^ writer ^ computer ^ crash ^ story ^ surrender ^ miracle

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Stop the Plague of Stuff

I love the holiday season, but I'm frustrated. With all the giving in the air, we've suddenly become inundated with good will and are drowning in a sea of books, videos, shoes, and clothes in so many sizes we could outfit a store. But we still need some things, like a size 14 pair of snow pants. Instead we have sizes 3-6 months, 12 months, 3Ts, and 7s which are useless and taking up space.

All of this is not good will's fault. These things were already accumulating despite careful intake because I was trying to be a good steward and not squander what God had given to us. But there is a fine line between good stewardship and hoarding.

Several years ago I ran clothing giveaways in our church that had little storage room. It was constantly so saturated with donations, mounds of clothing bags fell out of closets and overflowed into other work areas. It looked horrible and made a bad impression on church members and the community. People complained, but the ministry head was afraid if we limited the donors, they would stop donating completely and we would no longer have anything to give.

But it became simple and clear to me after finally bringing it under control. God wanted us to be good stewards and we weren't if we accepted more than we had room to store--we had an abundance of women's clothes, few children's and men's, and keeping the abundance disallowed us to obtain the needed items. I got bold and asked for only certain types of clothes that were hard to secure. We actually got them, which made us better able to serve the community.

After tripping through my home in frustration tonight, I remembered this, realizing our needs are being drowned by the abundant extras.

We must stop the plague of stuff, and stop being afraid to let go of something we don't need now but might later and we worry we won't be able to t replace it. And we need to do it by trusting God to supply the need when it comes. And I know he does because He incredibly restored three lost wardrobes for ND when she was an infant. (BTW, happy birthday CJ, and ND!)

So, over the next ten days I'll be donating all kinds of excess stuff. This will actually make way for--gasp!--bunk beds in the girls room which they desperately need. Wowwee! It's Christmastime indeed. :)

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Technorati Tags:  family ^ stuff ^ giving ^ give away ^ donate ^ stewardship ^ holiday ^ gifts ^ Christmas

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Blogging Again--my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) results

I can't believe so much time has passed since my last post. I guess that's what happens when you decide to participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month where the goal is to write 50,000 words in the thirty days of November.

I've been writing and writing with some incredible results. On the last Monday my word count sat at just over 28,000 words and I wondered how I was ever going to make 50,000 by Friday when I thought that the most I could write in a day was 5,000 because that's the most I had ever written. And I'm not one for writing unneeded words just to accumulate them. I began NaNoWriMo to write a specific book, so the last thing I wanted was a bunk of junk I needed to wade through when I returned to edit.

On Thurday, November 29, I did the amazing: write 9,256 words bringing me within range by 7,500 words win. And win I did.

Many people say the last few thousand words just about sail in themselves, but I fought with every last one to get them down. Not because I was out of story, though. Because I was exhausted. Never have so many words passed through my mind in such short time--16,000 words on paper in the last two day.

Above all, though, is the lessons I learned this November. I learned:

1. I can't and shouldn't forget my responsibilities (I didn't which is why I got behind)
   
2. I can't and shouldn't shift my priorities (I didn't)
   
3. I can write a lot more when I keep my e-mail program off (I did)
   
4. I write better with celtic or classical music playing through earphones to filter surrounding distractions meaning I can actually write when the TV is on behind my back. (I did)
   
5. I have more support to write than I thought (Wow!)
   
6. I had to let go of my contestant attitude toward writing and embrace writing as a daily endeavor. (I did)
7. I have to persevere to finish the novel which remained incomplete at 50,000 words. (I am)
   

If you're an aspiring or practicing writer and have never tried National Novel Writing Month before, I encourage you to give it a shot next November. It will challenge you like never before and give you an incredible accomplishment at the end--even if you don't quite make 50,000 words.

If you participated in NaNo this year, I'd love to hear how you did. Drop me an e-mail (see my sidebar) or leave a comment.

Oh yeah. My final word count? 50,070 validated words.

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Technorati Tags: writing ^ novel ^ National Novel Writing Month ^ NaNoWriMo

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Shocker

My 23-month old just burped. And said, "Excuse me."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Technorati Tags:  family ^ parenting ^ kids ^ manners

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Nearby Vermont family gets a home makeover

The Vitale family in Athens Vermont, a town nearby, now has a new home thanks to Extreme Makeover Home Edition.

I'm very glad for the family, and I can't help but remember how we almost applied for the show. What if we had and had been chosen? This family who needed the home more than we did to care for their son who suffers from numerous health problems would have not gotten the new home they received this week.

I'm a little disappointed, though. In one news report, the show's producer said this was the only home makeover they would do in Vermont due to Vermont's demographics. Applying for the show was still an option for us until I heard that this week. It makes things clear. We and our new house really are solely in God's hands. But they always were. Now I feel it. But it is good.

Besides, with our current finances we wouldn't be able to afford the taxes!

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Technorati Tags:  family ^ parenting ^ kids ^ house construction ^ building ^ Vitale ^ extreme makeover ^ home edition

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