All About Me

I've been married almost 20 years, to the same man for the whole time. (Eventually, you'll come to feel sorry for one of us.) I have two children, a young man that is in college, and a young lady that is in high school. They couldn't be more different from each other and it continually amazes me that we raised two such individual kids in the same household.

The current animal population is three cats and three dogs, since we’ve added a stray that my daughter managed to coax from the jaws of the other two dogs. Now that I think about it, five of the six were animals that we rescued. We’re not quite one big happy family, but at least all the dogs now get along with each other and all the cats get along. Hubby is NOT pleased to have an inside dog again, but it doesn’t bother me a bit.

Maybe one day we’ll have some cattle again, as long as I don’t have to grain the steer and watch him being trucked down the driveway enroute to the slaughterhouse. And I do believe before we got married I was promised some horses. I’ve been waiting a while, hm?

I formerly worked as a Registered Nurse, for the most part in the Emergency Department. However, I have currently been away from a paid position almost twice as long as I ever practiced. I was associated with medicine for long time, though. I started out as a candy striper at the age of thirteen. Then I worked as a nurse's aide while I was going through nursing school.

I was also a medic/flight medic in the Army National Guard, until I went to Officer Candidate School, where I met the man I would marry. Upon graduation from OCS, I eventually transferred to the Army Reserve, which had the good sense to send me to flight school to become a helicopter pilot.

Those occupations are the basis for one of my nicknames. Back in the olden days, when CB radios were popular and I was driving a lot, my handle was “The Flying Nightingale.” When I finally got a computer and got up the nerve to connect to the outside world, my handle was too long to use as a screen name for AOL, so I changed “Nightingale” to “Flo,” short for Florence.

As for my other nicknames (or personalities, as my sisters-of-the-heart insist they are), we’ll get to those in a future post.

My husband was also an officer and aviator. He was deployed twice in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Upon returning from his last deployment, we started building a house. And let me tell you, that is turning out to be quite an adventure, which I guarantee you’ll be reading about later.

And the reason I decided to publish a blog? A sister-of-my-heart (Holly's Hystrionics) recommended another blogger (The LawDog Files), and those became part of my "favorites" list (I have also recently added Holly’s Snot-Nosed Stepson). While browsing one day, I saw something that said you could get paid to have people read your blog by allowing advertising on your page (or however AdSense works).

"Doesn't everybody hate those web ads?" I thought.

"Of course they do. But even you click on one of them once in a while."

"Darn, caught in the act. Ok, fine. What could it hurt, anyway? Certainly not my bank account balance." I’ll explain the necessity of increasing the bank account balance another time.

The main reason I finally decided to get started will be the topic of my next post.

I hope you enjoy the reading, but don’t blab to my hubby or he might make me stop, and then you’ll never know. (I should have warned those that know me—now they’ll probably have to clean the spew off their screens at the thought of hubby thinking he could stop me from anything. See, you probably feel sorry for him already, don’t you?)

Flo