In the waiting line...

Another month in 2008 come and gone. And now October is already half over and I really don't have much to report. Tony's 35th birthday came and went. He's 35 and still no kids. It doesn't seem to bother him so I try not to let it bother me. We didn't do anything all that special. I baked him a four layer carrot cake with homemade cream cheese icing. It was delicious. I bought all the ingredients and my sister made him a wonderful lasagne dinner, per his request. He wanted World of Warcraft for his birthday but we kind of didn't have the money and he didn't hold up his end of the 'bargain' by getting a job. (We're both still fabulously unemployed.) When he didn't receive a gift from me first thing in the morning, he was convinced he wasn't getting anything. But I'm a big ol' sucker for my Monkey and Michelle and I made a trip to Walmart after supper to alledgedly pick up laundry detergent. I surprised him with the game after we had cake. He's massively addicted already, of course. He gets online every night and plays with his brother and two of their good friends. At least he's social in some aspect, right? So that was that.
The month of September also found my just barely 10 month old niece WALKING! She was so wobbly at first we joked and said she looked like a staggering drunk. But she's so smart and she mastered it in a couple of weeks and now she zooms across the living room and only falls down occasionally. She's almost completely abandoned crawling all together in favor of her new found mode of locomotion. She really is a delight and I'm just amazed that she'll be a year old in a month and 10 days!
Nothing else spectacular has been going on. My sister has developed a serious Webkinz habit. She's collected about three dozen of her own, not including her childrens'. They have roughly a dozen each. I wasn't real big on the whole thing and at first just bought the Cheeky Monkey because it was really cute and I thought it would be equally as cute to name it Tony after my Monkey. I stuck with the one since July until I saw the Lil' Kinz Monkey in Walgreens one day. I HAD to have it. Then I bought the regular Monkey. The Lil' Kinz Monkey is named Junior and the bigger version of Junior is George (as in Curious...). I was happy having a little house with three little monkeys and that was that. I planned on buying the Love Monkey in December when it's released and naming it Melissa just because. But then Webkinz came out with a whole Haunted House room theme for Halloween. This prompted me to purchase the bat and name it Leilah (it means 'dark beauty) and decorate her room with all the cool haunted house themed items. Today I absolutely HAD to have the Whimsical Dragon which I named Mysti. My collection is complete for a little while.
Halloween is coming up. Unfortunately my grandmother has been in the hospital for about a month due to congestive heart failure. Her heart isn't pumping enough blood through her body and it's making it hard for her to breathe and such. She has to have bypass surgery sometime next month when the doctors can get her stable enough. My parents were supposed to go down to Florida for a week beginning the weekend of Halloween which meant no Halloween party this year. I was pretty bummed but naturally I understood. However, Mom's vacation got canceled because they're having a huge sale that weekend and her boss pulled the plug on her vacation time. So now the party is tentatively back on. So I have a couple of weeks to throw together costumes for Tony and me. Something cheap and easy. I want to go as Alice from Alice in Wonderland next year and have Tony go as the Mad Hatter.
Tony is actively looking for jobs. He found something promising here in Enterprise. It's an assistant manager position at a local finance place. He's very much qualified and plans to talk to the manager on Monday when she gets back from vacation. As a back up plan, he's submitted apps to Game Stop (because he thinks it would be cool to work at a game store), RadioShack (he's worked there before) for seasonal work, and at PizzaHut and Papa John's as a delivery driver. :-p Hey, it would be income at least.
I, on the other hand, have stopped looking for work and decided to apply for disability. I put in my application today and expect to get a denial on my claim sometime in December. In the meantime, the very nice lady at the SSA office told me to contact a place called SpectraCare that offers free mental health treatment (meds included) to low/no income families. I'm calling them tomorrow. If I get approved for disability without having to go through an appeal I'll be completely amazed. But I'm honestly expecting to get denied and already have an attorney lined up for the appeal process.
In other not-so-special but really fun news for me... I got a yellow iPod Nano the other day! It's loaded up with every single song we have stored on our computer and still have 2 GB to spare. Hooray! I spent two days going through every one of our music files and retagging them using MediaMonkey so they'd all have the right artist, song title, album title, track number, and, most importantly, the album art associated with each one. It was a SERIOUS pain in my ass but totally worth it because my iPod has the cover flow feature just like iTunes. (And, yes, I am a shameless bootlegger and abuse the HELL out of Limewire every chance I get.)
And that's about it for my 'exciting' life. School is still going well. We're in week seven of this term and I have a 99% average in my Fundamentals of Networking with Lab class. Next term I'm taking two classes and the following term one class for a total of 12 credit hours for the semester. I'm going to wind up having to pay about $250 out of pocket for book and technology fees but it'll be worth it to graduate a little sooner.
Also, Ray and Michelle's PCS has been postponed until summer of next year. We're still considering moving with them depending on our situation when the time comes. I still feel like a change could do us some serious good but we'll see. A lot can change in six months, right?