Processing...

It's been...well.  One hell of a couple of weeks.  Emotionally, I'm off balance, and honestly off my feet entirely.  Flattened.  And it's going to take a while for me to sit up, much less get my feet under me.  

And life isn't slowing down.  

So.  The week after school started.  Mom had an appointment with her oncologist on Wednesday.  She called me on Monday, all chirpy and cheerful, and said she'd cancelled the appointment, and had stopped taking the hormone blocker.  She was certain it was killing her.  (What it was doing was starving her 4.5cm tumor to death.  Said dying tumor was releasing toxins.)  Said she knew that not taking the medication anymore meant that her cancer would stop shrinking, but she trusts God to take care of her. 

In other words, she decided not to take the damned helicopter he sent to fish her out of the flood water, that she'd rather die than fight. 

Uh.  Ouch.  

Yeah, I've told her outright that I don't want to hear anything about her health when I talk to her.  Because in choosing to commit slow, ugly suicide, she's forfeited the right to complain.  

Week before last, the imp called me from school in the late afternoon (right as study hall was starting).  Said he felt sickish.  He wasn't sure if he had a fever, but felt funny, and his stomach was bothering him. 

He's prone to truly vicious heartburn, so I figured that was all it was.  I went and got him (no fever, but he was quiet and lethargic--something he isn't).  And I gave him antacids, and bread (which, weirdly, helps his heartburn a lot...like it used to do mine).  

He was fine the next morning, so I sent him back to school.  

Friday afternoon, when I picked the kids up, the pixie was coming down with...something.  By Sunday, everybody else (except the imp) was starting to come down with it.* 

And...the patio roof came down.  As in: it detached from the back of the house, and crunched our grill.  Poured rain between the edge of the roof and the edge of the patio roof, first, then...crash.  Totally destroyed the outdoor kitchen, and yanked the light switch that ran the patio light and the ceiling fan back into the wall good and hard (broke the plate).  

The dog was outside.  She wasn't hurt, but she certainly got the poo scared out of her.  We managed to get her in the house, but her room and yard were rendered unsafe, so she spent the following several days utterly miserable.  

We spent several days arguing with the insurance.  They sent out a contractor to take pictures to send to an adjuster that apparently didn't understand what she was looking at on her desktop where she was poking options on drop menus.  

We have already gotten a quote for straight up replacement.  For a framed-in roof with osb, tpo, guttering, a light, and a ceiling fan.  Exactly what fell down.  

They quoted us either repair (pop it back into place--not an option, partially because it broke, broke the eaves and rafters where it had been nailed up, and as we found out, some of the osb was rotten), or "replacement" for a metal roof with a tar-paper cover. 

Yeah, it's not even ballpark.  And we couldn't have made up the difference.  At all.  Not without totally dropping another project that we'd already started.  (We were expecting the carport to collapse, not the patio roof--which had never given us any signals that it was a Cletus-built clusterfuck before it fell off the house, and had already pulled it down in preparation for a better one with a hipped roof to be put in its place.)

We're in the process of arguing with the insurance.  Our agent is on it, because, well, they don't want to lose the residuals.  If we shift home insurance, everything is going.  

So.  That.  And normal kids-at-school drama.  And puberty crap (yes, they're both going through it).  And...

...and yesterday, Queen Elizabeth II, the woman I've admired most for my entire life--one of the only women I've admired for all of my life--passed away, yesterday.  

That...kinda was the cherry on the shit sundae life slammed into my face recently. 

I'm grieving her passing, and for her daughter and grandchildren.  I'm grieving for her great-grandchildren.  I'm grieving for her nation, because while she did her best for her nation, even at her deathbed,** she didn't fix succession.  The fucking moron who could never step into her shoes planting his white-trash, low-class, trashy ass in her throne.   And his white trash whore of a wife is now titled "Queen Consort."  

Even as I grieve, though, I'm happy for Elizabeth.  She's home, with her beloved Philip, who passed on last year.  

*Pretty sure it was the Cold from China, round 2--symptoms were right.  Won't bother testing, because it's a cold, and I don't want to add to the panic-porn statistics. 

**She summoned the new PM to her bedside, the day before she passed, to swear her in.  Which means that the drooling idiot dribbling all over the monarchy can't do anything until after the next election...which is not like ours, and nobody knows when it will be held.  Given his age, he might actually not survive to another election.  We can hope, anyway.