Home Sweet Home

So here we were, Jill and I were unemployed, in an apartment we couldn’t afford, no food, no way to pay the bills.  We were forced to move again.  But where would we go?  Our options were unlimited and yet limited, how can we move when we can’t drive.  We needed help but from who?

Remember when I mentioned my mom and dad separating?  Well I neglected to tell you that the separation was not just a few blocks or a couple miles.  My parents lived in southern Chicago when mom left dad.  She packed up the kids and headed out west, out to Californy, movie stars, limousines, ocean air.

This meant of course that I had a lot of family whom I had never really met.  My father’s brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, all of whom still lived in the Chicagoland area.  So I got in contact with one of my aunts who I had been doing some work for.  She and I had built a relationship over the last 6 months or so.  I explained our situation to her and she suggested that we come to McHenry where she lived.  We would stay there for a while and then she would drive us back to Tennessee. Jill and I decided to take this opportunity and we moved to McHenry, which is about one and a half hours north of Chicago.

When we got to McHenry Jill and I didn’t really know what to expect.  We were going to be living with my cousin Kim.  She had a large house and at the time lived alone so it was a perfect arrangement.  We got settled in, and it was great.  We actually liked it quite a bit, and it seemed that Kim enjoyed having us there as well.

Kim who is a mortgage loan originator, needed an assistant. Jill, who is very good at office orientated work decided to help her for a while, at least long enough to get the money together for our move.  This worked out pretty well. Jill worked for Kim, and I started converting a hobby of mine into a business, something I’ll go into greater detail about later.

Things were moving pretty fast and before we knew it we had been living with Kim for 3 months.  It was about this time that we decided we really liked Illinois.  So why not live here, there was no real reason to go back to Tennessee, other than family, and we had family here.  So that’s when we made the decision. We would stay in Illinois.

There was just one small problem.  What was I going to do about my mom?  She was getting older; she was having a lot of medical problems, recently being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.  She had high blood pressure, was overweight, but then again so was I. She had a lot of problems that she did need help with.

So I decided that the best course of action was to have Mom move up to Illinois with me.  She didn’t really like this idea, but I didn’t give her a lot of choice. I was going to convince her that moving to Illinois was her only chance of happiness if it killed me.

1. A Small History Lesson	2. Congratulations It’s A Freak
3. The First Five Years	4. It All Goes Up In Flames
5. School Daze	6. Say What?
7. A New Hope	8. Becoming A Sophisticated Redneck
9. A New Beginning – Literally	10. Back Into the Fray
11. They Like Me, They Really Like Me	12. 10011001
13. Let the Music Heal Your Soul	14. Taking My Sister to the Prom
15. My First Love, My First Broken Heart	16. From Zero to Hero
17. Livin’ On a Prayer	18. Moving On
19. Going Full Circle	20. The Rockford Files
21. Faith of the Heart	22. Partner, Friend, Lover, Wife
23. Turns Out She Was Right	24. A One-Legged Bear
25. Another Victim of the Game	26. Payin’ Bills with my Skills
27. A New Revell-ation	28. A New Page, A New Day
29. R We There Yet?