Website Woes

I'm learning to build my own website and of late it is given me nothing but woes... ie footer code, header code.  How to put an image in the background and not in the header and how the footer should have a copyright, but do you really copyright it by saying it is, or do you need to do something like send it in for the copyright.... Luckily, I am moving on and learning as I go.  More to do later but for now I just move forward...

Ramblings of an old life

The day started like any other… waking to that damn alarm.  Struggling from a restless night sleep, I stumbled to yet another hotel bathroom and hurriedly got ready to rush to the lobby to catch the shuttle to the airport.  This job had way too much traveling.  I just wanted to get home to my family and figure out what had been destroyed while I was away.  It was always great to get home, but catching up on the laundry that had never been touched, and the dishes that were exploding from the sink.  The floors were always the worst.  Whoever told her that having 3 dogs would not be messy?  The Great Pyrenees, Stazi was the worst.  That dog drug in all of the mud from the entire county.  Each day she would dig deeper into to her favorite sleeping hole.  Each day the drizzle from living in the rainforest caused her beautiful white hair to turn brown.  Oh and how she sheds, there is enough hair daily on the floor to fill a pillow, and she had been gone for  a week this time, she was sure that there would be a garbage bag full…. All of the lower walls would hold traces of the mud that she had carried in.  The other dogs were really no better.  Tiger a pit-bull, and Rascal a border collie made their share of messes as well.  Tiger has a very temperamental stomach  and explodes from both ends whenever he eats anything other than dog food… But he loves his trash, and Stazi is quick to turn it over for him, she being a trash dog as well. 

STAZI

Art for TBI and PTSD

For me the PTSD came when a building imploded on me.  I was saved by an amazing Egyptian Soldier whom I shall never have the priviledge of knowing his name.  You see we had been in the dessert since November, we had only eatten MRE's (Meal Ready to Eat) since our arrival.  If you have never had these, count yourself blessed.  They are dehydrated yuck, but they did the job of keeping us alive.  Well it was February 14, 1992 and we just wanted some real food, so I went into the town of Hafar-Al-Batin to get some food.  Unfortunately, while I was in the town a scud missle was shot down from a tiger missle from going into Riyhad and hit the building next to mine.  This caused the building that I was in to implode. The impact caused me to lose conscienceness and now I live with a TBI and massive migraine headaches.  What I have found though is that I can keep some of these at bay by doing art.  I have started to learn to paint.  I am not brilliant yet, but time will tell and I may get good enough to not starve. Here are a couple I have recently painted... As an afterthought I have also found that yoga helps...

Photography How it saved me!

I was injured in the Gulf War and for the last 22 years I have been ill.  Some days I can function without much pain, some days not.  On those days when I am functioning I have found that I can take my camera my dog Rascal and explore the world around me.  At times I think that I am so very blessed to be up and out that I just shoot and shoot until the camera is full.  Other days I am contimplative and see the shot right in front of me, and know it will be the one.  I am going to try to save our family with my paintings and photography, with time I think it can happen.  So the journey is begun.

 This is Rascal -

Contimplating life gone past today... PTSD, TBI, MIGRAINE, OH and so much MORE!

I would be the first to tell you that PTSD is real.  It is haunting and it can control your life if you let it.  For me it has seized hold many times when I least expected it.  It has caused me to do crazy unpredictable things, mostly things that I regret.  But I have learned that I can have a normal loving life, even if it rears its ugly head every now and again.

I don’t know a soldier who wouldn’t do it all again.  Every one of us believes in what we have done to support our country.  But we all wonder at the cost of this freedom that we fought or fight to preserve. We come home broken, with war related illness, injuries, and unexplained feelings of loss and regret.  At first we deal with the obvious issues, broken bones, missing limbs, and the strange vomiting episodes that seem to control your every day, or something like this. The doctors know how to deal with these, at least some of them.  Then we move on and think that we are okay, but in reality nothing will ever be the same; but let’s look at same.   Do we really want everything to be the same?  We just risked our lives for those that we love; we had to change everything we believed in to become a fighting machine, as they say.  So the question is; how do we go back and live with our loved ones and not let what has changed us destroy them?

This is a journey.... My journey