First a warning that this certain post is dedicated to all things that have happened over the last 8 months, so sorry if it all seems a bit whiny and crazy, but it's all very.... very true.
Well, rambles ahoy! ( you've been warned!)
Anyway, I apologize for the huge break, it's been a very...very very rough and turbulent 8 months. Starting in August last year, we had a hacker get into the local bank and take all of our money... every last cent. We don't have any other bank accounts, so it was all we had, and were TOTALLY wiped out. We had no food, internet ( very necessary for my type of work), nothing to pay bills with, for about 6 weeks. If it wasn't for our landlord being the saint that he is ( he paid our rent and electric bill for us) The bank finally came through and gave us ( most) of our money back after that time, but we still had roughly over a thousand dollars of late fees to wade through...fun!!.
But even then we bounced back pretty quick - UNTIL! It happened again! RIGHT after we got our money back! We hadn't even had a chance to get groceries and another hacker decides to do this to us again. So for another 5 weeks we were penniless. Things were very very bad. And just to clarify, when I say penniless, I mean we broke the piggy banks and spent every penny we had for food. Ray and I work in comics, so our checks are very sporadic, and during these particular months we had no sooner cashed a critical payment when a hacker would strike. It was just terrible bad luck.
But, with help and support of some good friends we managed to keep food on the table and keep up Tycen's pre-school payments, and eventually the bank paid us back for our 2nd hacker attack, just in time for Halloween. ( will post Tycen's pics for that soon!)
Well, a couple weeks went by, when we had yet another strike, this time not from the bank, but from a credit card company that decided to pay our online bill for us....over and over and over again until we were entirely wiped out.... again!!!! I was pretty down at this point because the holiday's were coming, and I had a new book to work on ( talk about that later) and I had to spend all my time calling creditors, and electric companies, and trying to find money, when I should have been taking my son to look at Christmas decorations. Plus, having this kind of thing happen to you over and over again in such a short period was extremly stressful. I really owe Ray during this time, he really kept his cool and kept everything together and as happy as he could during this time. Thank you Ray :) :) :)
So, a few weeks later, after haggling with the credit card company awhile, they eventually paid us back. It was the beginning of December and things were looking up again, I was finally able to take my son looking for a tree and work on my comic more now that we didn't have to spend every waking moment trying to keep the electricity on.....
That's when the ice storm rolled in!! ( blare entry trumpets)
Yup, good ol' ice happy storms swept Kansas and coated pretty much everything in 1/4 inch of ice. Being from coastal California and Oregon I've NEVER given any thought to ice storms in my life :p I never thought they could do anything damaging.... but apparently they cause tree limbs to crash down on your roof, and the best part, makes your power go out for weeks right before Christmas!! Yippee! That's right, our house is in a section of town most ignore, so they waited for weeks to get to our block, so we had to evacuate our house. Luckily we had friends willing take us in ( thank you so much John and Kelly :) ) At least this time we had a little money for food, but Christmas is a very very important time for me, and the fact that I couldn't take my sonn to get a tree hit me pretty hard. But, we were all together, and that's what was important.
Luckily they turned the power on a couple days before Christmas and we were able to pull off a nice little Christmas.... until we all got a virulent stomach flu ON Christmas morning that lasted for a week.
Seriously, you think something is out to get us??
It's been three months now since all of this, and we're almost recovered now. Because of all bank problems, it incurred thousands of dollars of late fees ( that we had to pay and have yet to be reimbursed...) but we're getting over that finally.
The worst part of all this, is that I finally get to work on an awesome book for an awesome company, and the timing for getting them done started during this whole mess. It made the whole book behind, and .... well, I'll yak about that later. :(
I guess that's pretty much it. Sorry for all the whining, guess I had to get it out. I'll be trying my best to keep up with this Blog, it is pretty nice to be able to talk about anything :)
Thanks for reading guys! :)
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