Obviously, it’s been a crazy month. About 90% of that month involved round-the-clock care of two orphaned kittens. I’m going to make a separate post about kittens and the TNR project, because both have been big in April and could overwhelm this post. The other big part of April is that Jason and I had to cancel our 20th anniversary vacation. Again. This time it was my fault, though – I checked that my passport was valid, but apparently I checked before the last time we had it scheduled (Sept 2021) and it expired in October. I didn’t discover this until we were a month out from the trip, and there wasn’t enough time to get it renewed. So once again, plans have been postponed, and our current plan is go in September. We’ll see. Hopefully we’ll have this 20th anniversary vacation in the books before we hit our 25th anniversary, heh.

Reading and Watching
I read four books this month, including one reread, and other than the reread, my favorite was definitely Tiny but Mighty. On screen, this was a heavy TV month with a lot of junk-watching: The Ultimatum (so many red flags!), The Truth About Pam, Temptation Island, and Murdoch Mysteries (silly, but not junky at least). I also saw Everything Everywhere All At Once in theatre with my youngest son, and that was…a bizarre movie.

Goals
The big one: Our tax refund came in and we paid off all the rest of our consumer debt!

House
Jason buried the electrical line out to our night-camera, so that we weren’t just running a long extension cord through the grass. Also, our ice maker broke and splashed everywhere, so we had to replace that. I can’t even remember if this was the month we had to replace the bottom of the kitchen sink cabinet, or if that was March? Jason’s also working on replacing the top railings of our deck, because the ones we put on last year suddenly warped and ripped away from the walls… Most of this has been tucked into corners as we take care of the kittens. It sounds like a lot but most of it was tiny projects.

Health/Fitness
Unfortunately, this was my largest medical month of 2022 so far, including my first minor surgical procedure (a fine-needle biopsy into my parotid gland) which led to the conclusion that while the mass under my ear isn’t cancerous, it may become so, so I need surgery in the fall that will involve slicing through half of my face and neck, and may leave me with a side effect that involves my left external cheek sweating whenever I eat. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this crap. I was also diagnosed with a secondary autoimmune disorder of sjogren’s syndrome, mostly because of this mass on my parotid gland, plus I had another colitis attack that nearly landed me in the hospital again, and I need xrays on my left hip to see if something is broken. Fun! All that combined with hurting my foot on my only hike of the month (April 3rd, above pic), and I was basically down for the count this month. Ugh.

Favorite Photos
I barely touched my camera this month. I took a lot of photos with my phone, especially of the kittens, but I barely left the house and spent almost no time at all on photography. The one exception is finally taking my youngest’s senior photos (you know, a month before he graduates…). So this first picture is the six non-portrait favorites from April, followed by the three favorites of the 15 or so senior photos I kept from our photoshoot.

Top left to right: Shai around 3 weeks old; Lord Grey post-surgery in the very overgrown and very green spring yard; Hulud at 3 weeks old. Bottom, left to right: Lord of the Succulent Garden; post-bottle snuggles and miniature blep at 12 days old; a lady anole – all the lizards are back out in the garden!!

Gotta say, my photography skills (and camera) are much improved from when I took Ambrose’s senior photos on my iPhone…I can only imagine how much better this will get when I finally sit down to learn true editing skills!

Highlights of April
To be honest, because I wasn’t blogging and I think I only opened my computer like five times this month, I entirely forgot to keep track of these. They were there, but I don’t have a true list, so I’m skipping this.

Coming up in May
Not a vacation. Ugh. But that’s okay because we weren’t sure how we were going to deal with five-week old kittens at that point anyway. So this month will be our last month with the kittens, the end of high school for Laurence, the last full month that Ambrose will be with us before he enters the military, another minimal-if-any blogging month, and hopefully enough busyness and kittens to counteract my normal severe May depression/PTSD!