Is it May Already? - Talbert Zoo

I still can not believe that it is May. The weather here has been crappy and so has my mood. Funny how that works.Growing up in Wisconsin I remember the weather being cold but never for as many months as it is up here in Northeastern Washington.

I swear the seasons up here are like this. Winter begins right around Halloween. The temperatures drop to below 50 degrees and it rains, a lot. By January we are sick and tired of snow and cold. If we are lucky up here spring will arrive in mid April or May. If the temperature is above 60 degrees then spring is here and you will see kids running around in shorts. But I am freezing my butt indoors with jeans and a sweatshirt. Spring lasts a few weeks then summer hits you like a lightening bolt on June 1. Bam! All of a sudden it is 90+ degrees outside and dry. By July the grass is brown and ugly, unless you remember to turn your sprinklers on! The hot dry summer lasts until mid September. By Oct. 1 the leaves instantly turn brown and fall off. Temperatures dip into the sixties and we enjoy one month of autumn, rain, wind and cold yuck! But then winter begins right around Halloween.

Even though the sun is out longer I am still stuck in this winter blah mood. I am tired all day long and the stress of family, and business is taking it’s toll. I just wish I could dig a hole in the back yard and crawl into it like a little mole. It would be nice to disappear for a while.

My husband leaves for a week in Orlando next week for business. I am not looking forward to being a single parent of five for that week. My kids don’t always listen to me and I am scared to death that they are going to misbehave and the house will be a disaster.

I am frustrated with Parrot’s school right now too. On Monday he had three petite mal seizures at school. He had his first seizure when he was 2 1/2, then another one last February. When we took him to the doctor in February the doctor didn’t want us to worry too much and said to bring him back if they get more frequent or last longer than a couple of minutes. So, on Monday he went back to the doctor, but this time to another doctor in the same office. This doctor had some blood work done, just in case he has some kind of infection that is causing the seizures and he is being referred to a neurologist for an EEG. The school nurse wants to stay updated on Parrot’s health and she does not want him to return back to school until after his EEG. This is frustrating for me because he also has Asperger’s and needs to socialize with his peers at school. Kids with Asperger’s find socializing very stressful because they can not relate to “normal” kids. When I researched triggers for seizures I found that stress can cause seizures in some people. He always has a seizure in the morning upon arriving at school. Maybe the stress of knowing he is going to be socializing with his peers at school is causing him to have a seizure? I don’t know. But this is stressing me out.

My husband and I are in the process of opening a new online health and nutrition store, TalbertNutrition.com. We are working with a very reputable hosting company. They have won all kinds of awards and if you search the Internet for information about them you will only find positive reviews. Well, we have not had a very good experience with this company.

In February when we first started setting up our site with them we told the sales rep that we sell nutritional supplements and have about 20-30,000 products. He said that the server that they are going to set us up with can only handle about 8- 10,000 products. I decided that we could work with that and add more later. Now I am working on our product catalog for the site and the shopping cart will only let me upload 2,998 products. When I addressed this to them stating that we were told that we could have up to 10,000 products I found out that they placed us on a server intended for small businesses like doctors and lawyers and very small e-commerce sites that have less than 1,000 products. WTF!!! We were lied to and now they want us to upgrade to a private server and it is way out of our budget. So we decided that we will stick with the small server and cut back our product catalog so that the server can handle our site. I am very angry because with a small inventory we will not be very competitive in our niche. I hope that my blogging buds help me out in promoting this site so that we can make enough money to upgrade to the bigger server. I am counting on you guys! We are going to have an affiliate program too, so you will be able to make 10% on every sale from your unique link. TalbertNutrition.com officially launches on May 23, 2012.

So the combination of the crappy weather, the upcoming absence of the co-zookeeper, Parrot’s health and the mix up with our website has put me in a bad mood. Let’s hope that things get better from here! Thanks for visiting.