A Fishy Tail Tale

A couple of weeks ago I posted about my daughter Jessica buying two betta fish for her son, CJ and her sister, Molly. Remember "One Fish, Two Fish...Red Fish, Blue Fish"?Anyway, CJ's blue fish, "Cody" lasted less than a week, and was found belly-up one morning. Okay...now we are down to just one fish; red fish. So, we remove the divider between the apartments, to give Ozzy a much more spacious home. But after a few more days, the plastic tank he is in, (which has a plug on the bottom of it that is not sealed properly), begins to slowly seep water out of it. I walk into the room and see a tank that looks completely dry, (and water running across the top of the shelf that it's sitting on), so I investigate a little further. Poor Ozzy is lying with his nose in the corner of the bottom of the tank, ...and another one bites the dust...or so I thought.

I walk out of the room, and it occurs to me maybe, just maybe, the thing is still alive. After all, stranger things have happened around here lately. So I walk back in, assess the situation...and Ozzy the fish, "pulls a Bart" on me! Well okay... he didn't roll over, but I swear he turned his little head and looked up at me! He had his nose stuck in about an 1/8 of an inch of water in the corner of the tank, and was still alive...so I rescued him and put him in the container that he came in from the store. Yes, my husband saves a dog after it suffers a near death experience, and now I get to be the hero and save a little fishy from one!

For some reason though, we can't seem to get the stupid tank to hold water anymore. So Jess goes back to the store and buys a new pinkish-colored fish for CJ, (which he names Cody II), and two new tanks for the two fish. This time they get their own separate cubicles...instead of living in a duplex. Well, that was all fine and dandy for a few days, until Molly came in the room the other night, and discovered BOTH fish belly up. So long Ozzy...so long Cody II! I never even got a picture of Cody II.

Fast forward to last Thursday night... Jessica takes the kids to Walmart to get them each ANOTHER new fish. Molly picks out an orange and black one this time and dubs him "Tiger". Christian's new fish is kind of blue with red fins, and of course he wants to name this one, (you guessed it), Cody as well. Four year olds are so original at times. But then I tell him that his fish reminds me of Spiderman, because it's red and blue. CJ agrees with me and decides to name him that, which may have been a mistake. "Spiderman", apparently decided that with his new-found "super spidey powers", he should have no problem jumping from his tank into Tiger's....alas, he was wrong.

Friday morning, Ray finds his cold, dead fish body lying on the floor...poor Spidey. And then there was ONE...again. Jess is going to buy ONE MORE fish for Christian. That's it. If he doesn't survive more than a week or so...we were just not meant to have fish.

We Are NOT Having A Great Week!

First, it was the news on Saturday morning that our former pastor, Tom Kyle had passed away. We said goodbye to him on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning, I had gotten an email from my sister Laurie, saying that her daughter Missy's boyfriend, Scot had died the day before. He had some kind of cancer, and was doing better lately. In fact they'd just had a benefit for him last Saturday. His funeral is today.

Thursday morning, my mother called to inform me that my cousin, Patrick had also passed away. Patrick was 51 years old. He had been diagnosed with a melanoma skin cancer on his face last Fall. They had fought it with every cancer treatment there is, but it was apparently a very aggressive cancer, and nothing was working. His wake is tomorrow, with a funeral planned for Monday.

To top it all off, Ray came home yesterday (Friday), and said that he was unemployed. Technically, he's self-employed, he owns his own construction company. However, for the past few years, he has almost exclusively worked for one guy. The problem is, this guy has consistently tried to get out of paying Ray when he should, or what he is worth. The guy ALWAYS tries to discount everything, or says "I'll pay you next week", etc. Or he'll look at a bill and say, "We need to talk about this". I wonder if he says that to the phone company or the electric company when he gets bills from them.

Ray has put up with all of this nonsense for the past few years, mostly because he hasn't had to go out and find other jobs to do. This one man owns all kinds of property, mostly rental units, that always need maintenance, and sometimes major remodeling. At the moment, he has quite a few "irons in the fire", and had Ray constantly jumping from one to another. He was even doing some remodeling at the man's own house, because his wife didn't trust anyone but Ray to do it.

Ray is VERY knowledgeable about all aspects of the construction business and is VERY good at what he does, and can do pretty much ANYTHING. In spite of that, every time he bid on anything, this man would tell him that he could get someone else to do it much cheaper. Yeah, maybe. But whenever he's actually tried that, he'd end up paying Ray to come in and RE-do it the right way. Anyway, Ray finally got fed up with all of this and walked away yesterday.

Good luck, Sohan. Yes, you can probably find other men to do the work that my husband was doing, you'll just have to find about eight of them to fill the shoes of the one you let walk away, just because you didn't think he was worth more than $10 an hour to you.

There. I feel better now. I know that the Lord will provide for us through this difficult time, as he has in the past. There are just so many people out of work right now, including some of our best friends, that it seems difficult to me to "Fully Rely On God"...but I must. Please keep us in your prayers.

Sad Family News and Prayer Request

I learned on Friday, that my cousin Marshall, (who was 40 years old), was found dead in his home by his fiancee that morning. I don't know very many details yet, but he apparently had taken some kind of prescription drug of his girfriend's to try to fight flu symptoms that he was experiencing, and had also taken his own prescription drug for bi-polar disease. They're thinking that there was a bad reaction between the two drugs, at this time.

Marshall lived in Utah, and was a divorced father of a young daughter named Lexie. I was not especially close to this cousin, because of our age differences, but I'm still quite shocked at the news of this sudden tragic event.

Please pray for our whole extended family, and especially for his daughter Lexie, his brothers, Lane and Channing,(Channing and his wife Dawn attended our church for a short time a few years back), his father, Tom and his mother Betty. Aunt Betty, (my father's sister), has been battling alcoholism most of her adult life. It's NEVER easy for a parent to bury a child, and the fact that this tragedy happened just before Christmas, will likely make it even worse. Thanks for your prayers.