Mama’s big day, being miserable, not so simple

Mama has some big doin’ today in Keller. I am not aware of the name of the event, but she has stressed over being adequately prepared for it for several days now. She spent hours yesterday evening getting her Square set up to allow her to take credit cards for sales of her Color Street wares. Between her, Victoria and a friend in her upline, they were able to get her ready to use the device, but it was touch and go for a while. I set an alarm for 5:45 to make sure she was up in time to get out the door by 6:30 but she was up well before that and out the door by 6 am. Mama prefers face to face events versus doing things online so she has high hopes for sales today as well as making contact with potential stylists in the crowd she will share the day with. Mama’s friend and mentor set up the event for Mama because that friend is having cataract surgery today, so she was not able to attend herself. I look at this as kind of a birthday present for Mama. Her actual birthday is tomorrow. I am scheduled to teach a class and with church tomorrow evening, there will be precious little we can do to celebrate her birthday that day. I will make up for that.

I taught a class yesterday and struggled through the seven plus hours doing so. For the past couple weeks, I have felt miserable. Constant nausea, constant bloating, constant discomfort. Not in my belly, but just below my ribs, high in my abdomen. It was very bad Sunday morning a week ago and I missed church because of the nausea. I was better that night and got to go to church for the evening service, but the pain has been my constant companion throughout last week, growing steadily worse. Saturday morning as we were gathering for Bus calling the pastor and I were talking about the pain I was having, and he said it sounded like what he went through when he had issues with his gallbladder. There were enough people at the church for Bus calling, and I was feeling badly enough that I ended up coming home instead of going out with the pastor. With that little nugget of information I had been given, I did some research and found his diagnosis to be sound. So, at Mama’s doctor’s appointment yesterday – she went so she could get a referral for her knee but the timing was excellent – she told the doctor about what I was experiencing and I will see the doctor this morning. We will see what outcomes that generates, but I would not be surprised if I have to have my gall bladder removed. Hopefully, not today. I would not like to interfere with Mama’s day.

Saturday, I made up three candy boards to put on the hives. I was not satisfied with the syrup feeders. Although the bees consumed a gallon of syrup per hive, the in-hive trough-style syrup feeder was getting nasty. Once I had to take it and wash out some worms that had begun to grow in the fermented syrup and another time, I found hive beetles in the feeder. Neither was a good discovery. I had the candy boards built and had used them last winter. All I need to do was make get the sugar into the frames and place those on the hives. That was easily accomplished with the one issue of a top not fitting on one of the candy boards. To remedy that, I took one of my extra honey supers and repurposed it into a candy board. I will install that on the hive with the ill-fitting candy board later this week.

Yesterday, as I was teaching my class, we got the information from the title company in Lawton for the closing on the house we are selling there. What I needed to do was to print those papers, sign them in front of a notary, email the scanned copies to the closing company and FedEx the originals to the title company. No bit deal right? Wrong. I could not access the printer at the office, so I came home to print the forms out on our printer. After more than forty-five minutes of trying I could not get the printer to respond properly. (That printer will never print a document ever again.) Running against the clock of having access to a notary and getting the documents to the title company before they closed for the day, I was out of options.

I had Mama call the Pack-n-Mail to see I they could help us out. They could. In fact, they were going to have the notary stay around after 5 pm to wait on us. I forwarded the email to the store so we would have access to the documents when we arrived. We headed out and were at the Pack-n-Mail in Decatur just before 5 pm. Turns out, Mama had been talking with the store in Denton. There was no notary available in Decatur. Since we were in the Decatur store, I worked with the young lady running the store to get the email to her computer and got the documents printed and signed and packed in the overnight package which was picked up just as we sealed it. That was good timing. We were able to scan the signed document and get them to the title company a little after 5:30 pm. All that cost me less than $4. We will work on the notarization of the documents today.

How something as small as printing a document turned out to be such a fiasco is what makes life interesting…and terrible frustrating.