So neglectful

I have been so neglectful of this blog this year.

In truth, it became more time consuming than I should have allowed.

With all the attempts to increase traffic and potentially make some money off the blog, I was spending hours a day doing this.

More time trying to increase traffic than time writing, which is never a good thing.

The holidays and the beginning of the year took time away from blogging naturally because it is such a busy time.

Though, the main reason I stopped was because I just wasn't feeling it. I need to feel a call to write, otherwise, it's just babbling and not anything worth sharing or reading.

So, I focused my attention on other things. Job hunting. Cleaning out my parents attic and selling my childhood things on ebay. Friendships.

Sometimes I did miss blogging and my blog friends. I will really try to blog at least once a week.

I have been entirely neglectful of writing as a whole. I write nothing other than status updates on facebook. Nothing real. No fiction. Nothing.

It's a part of me I have let go. Perhaps that is what is missing.

Almost Christmas?

How did we get here already?

This year flew by faster than usual.

And the last 2 months just disappeared.

My last blog entry was right before Halloween. November and December have been blurs.

After we chose a place for my uncle, the following weeks were taken over by moving preparations, packing, Thanksgiving prep, Thanksgiving, moving him the day after Thanksgiving, getting him settled in the first week of December and putting up the Christmas decorations last week.

With it being a shorter span between Thanksgiving and Christmas than it sometimes is, I feel like I have been shorted on my holiday season.

I love Christmas and it has been so rushed and busy and non-Christmasy that I am not at all in the Christmas spirit.

We've only got a week and a half left, so I need to get Christmasy soon.

I have about half my shopping done. I am normally completely done by now.

No baking done, though I am usually on my second round.

My cards are not out yet.

No wrapping at all done.

No gifts shipped to my grandpa or best friend on the East Coast.

I am so behind.

But I cannot get the song for the Lottery out of my head. I think it's a local commercial, so only locals would know what I am talking about. It's so catchy, I walk around singing it all the time and just when I get it out of my head, the commercial comes on.

Phew!

After weeks of hunting for a place to move my uncle, I finally got my mom to settle on a place.

It was one of the first places we saw. It's in a 55 & over building, but they allow people over 21 to live with the 55+ person, so my cousin can live with my uncle.

My mom was hesitant to put him in there even though it is as close to perfect for my uncle as it can be.

It's about 2 miles from my mom, so a mile farther than she goes now, but that's as close as we could get him.

It's also got flexicore ceilings, so it is very quiet. Where he's at now is on one of the busiest streets in Chicago and is ridiculously loud. So, it will be nice to be somewhere quieter.

It has elevators and step-in showers and it's wide open so he can get around, plus there is a balcony he can get out onto without a ramp. It's cozy and nice without being too nice that we would worry about a potential mess.

And it's affordable.

My mom kept wanting to see what else was out there and I was the one doing the research to find places. Places he could get into are either to expensive or too far.

She said he was concerned about transportation for my cousin (he doesn't have a car) and the fact that it's a 55+ building.

I kept telling her not to worry about my cousin, when he starts paying rent, then he gets a say.

She was getting herself all worked up about it and super stressed.

Finally, last week after we went to see another place that would have be good except that the doorways are far too narrow and there is no step-in shower, I had had enough.

I told her that if he was so concerned about my cousin not having transportation and being far from young people, then why did he have no problem moving from house to house going further out into the boondocks in the far North suburbs for so long? There was no bus at all. No restaurants, no stores for miles. There is a bus stop right outside this place. Not CTA, but still, transportation.

I proceeded to tell her that his choices are this place or a nursing home. There is nothing else he can afford. And his son cannot go to the nursing home with him, so, those are his choices, stop kowtowing to everything he wants. We are running out of time and if you wait, you will lose this place and he will end up in a nursing home.

I was very angry. I get so tired of all of us having to bend for them, yet they keep demanding more and more and she lets them have what they want rather than drawing a line.

So, my rant apparently gave her courage because she basically told him what I just said and he said okay.

Hallelujah!

So, now we just have to figure out when to move him. We can move him in after the 15th of November and he has to be out of his current place by December 1st. The only issue is that Thanksgiving falls in the middle of that and my brother-in-law's 40th birthday, so our dates to move him are limited.

I so wish I had money to hire a moving company and let them deal with it all. He has so much stuff and there are so few of us. I hope we can keep him in this new place for a very long time. I hate moving him.