The Syndicate

So glad to hear your brother is doing well!!

And that new nephew is a. dor. a. ble!!!!!!!

My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family SVS.

<3 Daisy - I did nothing you wouldn't do for me. Love you to bits.

If you ever need someone to talk to let me know. I love helping people even when all I can do is listen. If you want, I'll pm you my cellie number.

Alison - what a wonderful story and thread idea! I'm so happy that so may bad things happening to you ended with such a positive outcome. Not everyone has the same happy ending. Good for you for seeking the positives in a year when so many negative things happened to you.

Some people here know, but lots don't, that I had a phoenix moment myself. Just before I moved out to the desert, the apartment next to mine caught fire. I was at work at the time and they had to bust through my apartment to contain the fire. I lost almost everything I owned, including Neffie and Apollo, my two kittes. They went running from the fire, but I was never able to track them down as I wasn't there when it happened.

I had been planning to move out west to be with BDH, but that experience conciderably stepped up the speed in which all that was going to happen by several months. (When God *literally* strikes a fire under your ass about priorities, one tends to listen.) About a week or so after the fire, my Gram passed. She was my rock. So many bad things happened in that month. But so many good things happened to.

The infinately wonderful as well as forcefully persuasive SVS set up an online fund to help me recoup my losses. Many people from the now dead LP community and ever thriving HV commuinty donated to said fund. 10 buck here, 20 bucks there, sometimes more. In the end it helped to pay the down payment on the appartment we still live in as well as pay for the bed we still sleep in many years later.

And as wonderful as my online family was during my time of stress, my community off the internet was amazing as well. Another fund set up by the members I worked for raised enough money to help pay for the cost of driving out here, a car to get out here with and a little extra to cushion things some while I job hunted. People I had professional relationships (IE the funeral director and florist as well as my work) helped me to find the most cost effective ways to honor my Gram's memory and still save as many pennies as I could.

What I took away from the experience was not how aweful life is, but how wonderful it is. I took away how loving and kind humans can be. It was one of the most amazing things I'd ever experiened and I never would have had the experience if some tragic crap hadn't happened to me.