[Nevertheless] We Make it Work

We are truly blessed by the people in our lives.

It seems everything in our lives was going to pieces in 2019. My van had multiple issues, my husband's car is dying, we need a new stove, my health is getting worse, a tree fell on our van. Then another tree fell on our house/van.

Through it all, we've patched things up, changed the way we do things in order to cope. We make it work. We are thankful for what we have and what we can do.

Nevertheless, friends and family came to the rescue...fixing our van at a much lower rate than a mechanic at a shop would have charged; giving us money to tide us over when we had to pay out of pocket to get our electricity reattached to our house until the insurance came through; and this weekend - giving us a car so my husband doesn't have to drive his death trap of a vehicle and can go farther than to work or the store in town.

So I sit here at Panera at 7:30AM, sipping a cinnamon latte, passing two and a half hours finding ways to pass the time until I pick up our rental car at 10AM for our whirlwind trip to PA to get the car from my in-laws. I'm thankful it isn't busy, so I should be able to camp out here for a while. I'll head to Goodwill after it opens if it gets too busy here, and then walk down the hill to the car rental place and pray everything goes smoothly.

What do I do to pass the time? I take a walk down memory lane. Scrolling through Facebook, I jot down memories from the year on a CVS receipt I found in my purse to add to our memory jar, just in case we missed adding anything to the jar right after it happened. I also list our hikes, finding out I listed Hike 17 twice on Facebook, so we've hiked 28 times this year, not the 27 I'd originally thought. And then I move on to the movies we've seen. 

I catch up on homeschool co-op stuff. I write and publish a blog post, trying not to outwardly cry as I type. I send out an email to my @ the table peeps. I contemplate my need for a bathroom vs. my need to not leave my computer at the table while I go.

Forty-five minutes to go. I discover my computer battery isn't charging, even though my laptop is plugged in. I attempt to fix it, looking like an idiot blowing into the battery compartment of my computer and muttering under my breath. It seems to be working. Fifteen minutes until full charge. Then I can pack up, use the facilities, and be on my way. 

All this to save the $50 more it would have cost us to rent the car had I picked it up when they opened at 7:30AM. But I made it work. Besides, it's not often I get time to myself to just sit and reminisce.