Dear Roger, Monkey Balls and Finding Home,or Another Day in Paradise

We have finally found our home.Not so much our new address, but our new home.We arrived in Portland on Sunday to bright and sunny skies and beautiful scenery and my friends were at the train station to pick us and our 7 bags of up. The train ride was an adventure with lots of interesting things to see and people to hang out with, and on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the most horrible experience ever, I would only give it a 2. I have bruises on both of my hips from trying to sleep in the seats, and I had to wear the same boots and jeans for 3 days, as well as go without a shower, but I have experienced worse. The kids seem to do really well, and being able to see most of California without having to drive through it was pretty nice, though I would have liked to have stopped and played in the Ocean for awhile at Point Conception.

Being around my friend Susan again has been great for me. Chance and I had a fit of giggles on the train when we both realized that she is my own personal "Alice", the character from Twilight. She is a very girly girl, into dressing up and always trying to get me to dress more girly and she lives to shop! I wanted to see the weird side of Portland, so she takes me to Hawthorne street and shopping, and then to the mall and shopping, and we have been to pretty much every store in the area. She is fantastic with the Stinky Princess and fixes her hair and her clothes and does girly stuff with her, and hopefully she will work on her and let me and my grungy fashion sense be.

She got me to try some different things up here including a type of drink called,'Bubble Tea", a concoction where the put tapioca balls into some blend of tea and fruit juices. I got one of those things in my mouth as I took a sip and I about spit all over the mall! It was disgusting and slimy and all kinds of weird, and of course the 'balls in the mouth"jokes started right away,(kinda hard to avoid with two 14 year old boys hanging around with you), and it was like a race to see who could come up with the more inappropriate jokes and make us laugh the hardest, it got to the point that the boys faces were so red that they looked like they were gonna explode, I was laughing so hard people were staring and Susan had tears running down her face as the Stinky Princess looked up at Chance and said,"Dont you like balls in your mouth?" We decided to leave the mall at that point because security was coming to see what the commotion was all about. We also found that using a straw you can shoot the balls a good 20-30 feet at whatever you found as a target.

During our wanderings we found some toys for Stinky, including a couple of stuffed animals. She wants a sock monkey, but we found a soft kitty and a really cool looking little monkey with a tail that is kinda small and just the right size to carry around and annoy people with, so it became out mascot for the day and everyone took turns doing weird stuff with this goofy stuffed animal! Susan was about ready to kill me as we where headed up Burnside and I kept slowly moving the monkey into her line of vision saying,"Do you want to spank the monkey?" SPANK IT!!! and making the boys just die with laughter. It was totally stupid, but we were high on just having a good time and we looked at apartments and schools and all kinds of things and just enjoyed being around each other . Chance is acting like a new kid, now that he is around is best friend again, and he is going the first part of August for a week to the coast for church camp and I am glad he is going to get out and become part of something again.

The concert we are going to is coming up soon and we are getting excited! I would love to take my friend, but I dont know if she would really enjoy all the craziness that goes along with that kind of crowd. The Avett bros. are going to be here next week and I know she would love them, but the tickets are waay expensive, so we are going to have to miss them this time around, but maybe next year.

My boys and ex are doing okay. It was hard to leave them but they are happy and I know that they will be doing good once school gets started and the routine is back up and running, I just hope that the ex can keep it together, after all, I set it all up for him to succeed all he has to do it try hard and put in some earnest effort.

I havent had any nightmares lately and I am sleeping better. In fact I am planning on stepping down the dosage on my seizure meds pretty soon as well as my Topamax, to see if the change in altitude allows me to go off of them altogether. Because its not a bright up here and my eyes dont get blasted as much, I have already had fewer headaches and I feel GREAT! Except for my left knee, and that just needs to be rebuilt or replaced, there are no two ways about it.

I miss Fergus. I know he is a great help with the boys and they love him too, but my big drool baby whined for me the first night I was gone, and the ex says he has looked for me, that broke my heart. I miss him soo much and strangely that has been the one thing to bring me to tears over this whole move. I am looking for an apartment that will allow me to have him, and as my companion animal/therapy dog for PTSD, I figure that most will have to, but then going back and getting him is going to be a logistical nightmare, but I just cant see me coping too long without him.

We are going out today to look at more places and to just be tourists for a bit. Portland is wonderful and the people are interesting and I am finally feeling at home and mostly at peace.