A busy update.

We are officially half way through Gorilla's pre-deployment leave. And as expected, it is passing way too fast. Fortunately, we've been able to spend lots of time together. Unfortunately, most of that time has been spent doing boring errands and accomplishing much needed tasks to prepare for the PCS that I will have to endure by myself.

One of our grueling tasks has been to get the dogs prepared for the pain that is the quarantine procedure for Hawaii. Because Hawaii is a rabies free state, not only will I sleep easier at night not having to worry about vicious raccoon or bat attacks when we finally make it to Hawaii, but I also get the joy of having to pay ridiculous fees to get my two cute rabies-free doggies there. I almost cried at the vet office today seeing them try to draw a ginormous vial of blood from our smallest one. Luckily the tech decided against trying to draw from her jugular (seriously-that was her first idea) and instead chose her leg. I think I may have passed out from the former. After the vials were extracted and spun in a nifty machine, we had to overnight them to Texas for a small fee of $56. Yikes. Let's hope these water fearing dogs are worth it. (yeah, they both refuse to get in the ocean. Wimpy ass dogs!) I worry what I'll be like at doctor's visits when I have real children if I can't stomach a vet visit.

Side note about the vet: For the entire life of our dogs, we've always taken them to a vet recommended by friends. Stupid me, despite being a military brat, never realized that there was a vet on BASE that was ridiculously CHEAP! I only realized that after this whole quarantine issue came up. But I WILL NEVER GO BACK TO A REGULAR VET AGAIN!! The prices make me feel like I am STEALING from them. We have all been raped by our civilian vets. No more $40 per pet per vet visit. I spent only $12 today for both dogs. $12. That's ridiculous. My old vet would have charged me at least $80 just to LOOK at my dogs. When I went to the base vet last month and got them both micro chipped and rabies shots, it was only $40 something! Seriously folks. Start using your base vet. End side note.

To further torture my fur babies, we had our couch picked up by Goodwill today and they now (along with the hubby and I) have nowhere to lounge in the living room. It's sad to see them standing in the middle of the room looking lost and uncomfortable. Gorilla has adapted- he's totally okay with sitting on the hard floor while playing video games. I took a more high maintenance stance and required a chair from another room so I could peruse the interweb.

We've also been dealing with the hassle that is my still-broken vehicle. My car wreck happened on January 9th (my birthday) and I still don't have it back yet. I was teased with it for two days last week only to realize that they scratched identical tears through the brand new leather seats on both the passenger and driver side. Yeah, not happy about that. So we are waiting once again. To make things even better, Gorilla has convinced me to sell the car that I love, that I haven't seen in four months, so that we don't have to ship it to Hawaii. Of course there was never a discussion as to whether we would leave the Jeep behind. So now we're trying to figure out how to take care of that- IF I ever get my car back!

We're also still dealing with the house selling. We've had over 18 viewings and zero offers. All our feedback has been positive, everyone loves the house and how it's decorated. The only negative we've heard is that it's too small. Well I can't change that. So we're just crossing our fingers that the perfect couple will come along and love it just as much as us. Good news is that although we'd love to sell it sooner rather than later, I have a whole deployment to wait through before I actually HAVE to sell it. So no price lowering or desperate maneuvers for us...yet. But I'll be grateful when I don't have to clean the house spotless every morning or be forced from my home at short notice. Anyone have any ideas as to what I can do with myself when we have to leave the house with our dogs? We don't live near anything, so it's a waste of gas to go all the way into "town" every time there is a showing. But we're getting pretty sick of driving around the neighborhood looking like stalkers. (good news about that is that I've had 3 rental cars during this time so my stalker/psycho status with the neighbors isn't that high yet)

So you can see why blogging has once again been put aside. Between getting ready for the deployment, still trying to sell our house, and preparing for the PCS, there's been time for little else.

I'm off to go peruse houses in Hawaii and dream of the millions I wish I had...