Outback and Nightmares

Hi, welcome again.  It’s a beautiful day outside, so let’s have a seat outside on the front porch.  Grab what you’d like to drink and I have some cheesecake to offer you from my oldest’s eighteenth birthday today!  I got it from Costco, so it should be really good.

After church, we went to Outback Steakhouse, the birthday boy’s favorite restaurant.  It’s funny because he doesn’t have steak, but chicken fingers.  I asked him why he liked Outback so much – the Bloomin’ Onion or the food.  He said both.  I then said that they didn’t call it Outback Chicken House, but he said they were really good chicken fingers and that’s just the way it is.  OK.  I guess I’ve been schooled in the delicacies of chicken tenders and Outback’s abilities to make them very well.  I will probably never find out because I can’t pass up their sirloin steak.  This time I added coconut shrimp to it.  YUM!  I haven’t had the pleasure of a good coconut shrimp for so long.  These were perfection along with the steak.

This was a busy week with things on the calendar as well as fighting against the calendar to get some necessary work done outside before the cold comes to stay.  We’ve been incredibly fortunate to still have 60º+ days (one day we hit 80º!) in November.  There are still a few things I want to get done with a couple of days with predicted temps in the 60’s before they appear to drop to normal for this time of year.  The cold is very sad for me, but it’s how it is for those of us in the midwest during Fall and Winter.

I was able to see two of my nieces that I don’t get to see very often.  Monday I was able to spend some time with my niece home from Belgium for a couple of weeks.  We didn’t do anything special.  I took her to LePeep, we went shopping, picked up my oldest from school and then she needed to be somewhere else.  The first thing we did, though, is pick up my youngest at school.  He said he wasn’t feeling well.  We both thought he was trying to get home to spend time with her, but before we got home, he asked me to roll down the window.  Let’s just say, before we went to LePeep, we stopped by the car wash first!  Thank God he told me to roll down the window first.  He felt better by the evening, but then called the next day to be picked up again because he had gotten sick in the bathroom.  When he got home, he slept most of the time he would have been in school, so he was evidently fighting something but was good for the rest of the week.  We rounded out the week seeing my other niece in her last theater performance of her senior year in “The Music Man”.  She did a great job and it was good to see her.

On Friday, my oldest and I went to tour Butler University.  It is a beautiful campus and has a lot to offer, plus it’s extremely close to home.  He was beyond grumpy before and during it, so I wasn’t expecting to have a positive review.  However, he told me that he liked it and it was a close third.  He’s going to try out for the theater programs at Ball State and Butler, but if he doesn’t get into either of those, he wants to go to University of Evansville.  I told him that it might come down to money and how many scholarships and grants he can get at all the schools. It’ll be interesting to see where he ends up.

I hope this coming week brings less exhaustion on my part.  These early mornings with my youngest are killing me because I also need to stay up for a bit after they go to bed to settle some or I’m awake for some time.  So, getting more sleep by going to bed earlier doesn’t work.  Today I feel beyond exhausted because I ran out of the blood pressure medicine I take to help with nightmares, (I have really good blood pressure, though, so I have to take the very smallest amount of it or I feel like passing out).  I didn’t think a lot about it, but oh my!!!  The night I didn’t have the medicine I had horrible nightmares, waking me up throughout the night, and the next night, with the medicine, I still had vivid bad dreams but I was able to sleep through them and didn’t remember them as vividly, but they were still bad.

I wonder if this will ever end.  I’ve always had bad dreams, as all of us have.  When I was younger and married, I often had nightmares of being chased, often by someone coming to kill me.  After talking to other abused people, I believe this is a common nightmare for people who have been in abusive relationships.  These nightmares I have now, though, are brutal.  They usually always involve my husband’s coming back from the dead and it ending horribly or is horrible throughout. The main nightmare I had this time involved my husband and me and then a friend who was diagnosed with leukemia two months after he died and ultimately lost her battle 18 months later.  It was brutal, I understood it fully and it has haunted me ever since (leaving me to dream about it again the next night).  Will these nightmares ever end?  Will I ever be free from them or am I going to be sentenced to reliving these scenes and hurt the rest of my life?

Well, on that uplifting note, I’m going to sign out for the week.  All in all it was a great week with family.  I relish time with family.  I’d love to know what’s been going on in your life.  How are you doing and how was your week?

~ Joanna Lynn

(Weekend Coffee Share is part of Diana’s blog.  Stop by to check out her blog and have a visit with some amazing blogs.)