I have found a new favorite movie. Unless you've seen it, you probably won't understand why it's funny.

It is, though. :)

Ack. I totally just blanked on my co-worker's name. I don't mean I just couldn't remember it for a second, I mean I couldn't remember it at all. I had to go and ask him. Well, I went to ask him and then remembered his name when I was looking at him, but it was scary! Scary and kind of embarrassing, because when I went into his office and started to ask, I suddenly shouted out "ANDREW! Your name is Andrew!" I'm glad he has a sense of humor.

Something is wrong with my brain, seriously. My perspective of time is all out of whack and I'm forgetting really random, yet completely familiar, things. Steve went to help Anthony sort out a computer problem the other day and he left while I was reading something on the internet. I looked up at the clock and thought "Good grief, he's been gone for an hour! It's not time for him to be there yet, but he's gone! Where did he go?" I called his cell and he was in the car driving over there. He had only been gone for 15 minutes. It was really strange. I was so confused that it scared me. That has happened more than once over the past couple of weeks. Does stress do this to people? Anyone? Bleh. I'm not old enough for memory issues of this magnitude.

In other news, we just got back from a week long trip to St. Louis, which was fun. I couldn't "Blog Along the Way" because I didn't have much access to a computer, but I'll tell you all about it when my brain is back in working order. Wait...no. I'll tell you about it before then, because that could take years! I'll post about it soon. :)

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Now that I'm fairly established as the "Friendly Neighborhood Sign Lady" (and yes, I sign emails that way when sending something out en masse) I am given a bit more leeway to do different things with my special event signage. The standard signs are white, with red and blue borders, a SpRocket logo at the top and "welcomes" the name or logo of the group having the event. However, since we've built the Davidson Center, we are getting more things like wedding receptions and rehearsal dinners and a lot of our guests want signs that match their wedding colors or invitations or whatever. That probably would have been a no-go at some point, but now that we are hurting for money, people who pay get what they want! :) I like doing the wedding and rehearsal dinner signs because it gives me a chance to do a bit more design work than usual and I get to use fonts other than Helvetica Black. Occasionally I get a request for an culturally specific event that I'm completely clueless about, so I have to be very careful about colors or symbols or whatever. Yesterday I got a request for a sign for something called a Simcha, which the internet tells me is a Jewish celebration that can be for anything. I am not Jewish and I know all of one Jewish person (and as far as I know, she is from a Jewish family but doesn't follow the lifestyle). Ergo, I was lost. At any rate, since it was for a rehearsal dinner, I knew I didn't have to be too specific with traditions, even if I did want to be sensitive about their traditions. So, I researched and downloaded things and did a lot of rearranging and starting over until I had what I believed was both appropriate and pretty. Then I checked to see what wording was requested for the sign and it said "Shalom, Y'all". I kid you not. I was not aware that we had Jewish rednecks in Huntsville, or anywhere else in the world, but there you go. You learn something new everyday. SIGH.

2) I watched a very scary movie on YouTube yesterday! Normally I can watch scary movies and they don't bother me, but this one was freaky. It's called [REC] and it's basically the Spanish-language original that the movie "Quarantine" is based on. Steve hates horror movies, so I knew I'd have to wait until it came out on DVD before I'd get a chance to see Quarantine, so I decided to watch the original with the subtitles. If you like scary movies, I suggest you watch this one (you can find it on Google Video, too). It's very claustrophobic and freaky. I watched it during my lunch break yesterday and I was listening to it with my earphones in. There were a lot of jump-out-at-you moments, so I can only imagine the sounds coming from my office: silence then "AHHH!" more silence then "NOOO!" It was the kind of movie that made it hard for me to sleep, so it must have been scary. The only other movie that does that to me is The Exorcist, and I refuse to watch that one ever again.

3) My voice is almost gone. I ran out of allergy meds on the same day that I had to replace a sign outside. The sign is planted in a built up flower bed that is about waist high on me and the flowers poked me in the face the whole time. I have been fighting my body's urge to get any worse, and I even bought the kind of allergy medicine that you have to get by giving a DNA sample and 8 forms of identification to the pharmacy. If I but anything else with pseudoephedrine in it in the next couple of days, the FBI will come and cart me off. I'm on their Meth watch list now, I suppose. Of course, we also have the nice cough syrup that Steve got the last time his allergies were acting up, so I take that too. It makes me all warm and tingly. DARN POLLEN. It's freaking October! Go away already!

Hello :)

It's been a while, but I'll be honest, I haven't really felt like writing lately.

No, don't worry, everything is OK right now and hopefully getting better as the days go on. I've just been in a kind of "blah" about everything, including my blog. Blasphemy, I know. I suppose it's my subconscious' way of saying "Well, you just spent 3 1/2 months in a kind of borderline insane/hurt/losing-ones-mind hell, so maybe we'll just try to see what it's like to be calm and a bit bored for a while, shall we?" My subconscious is cool like that, sometimes.

(This next part is a bit personal, so for anyone sensitive to that kind of thing who doesn't want to read it, you can go now.)

So here's an update: things have been better for the past couple of weeks. Steve and I are working on making things better and I'm trying very hard to deal with everything that happened without going crazy. It isn't easy, but I'm doing OK with it. My main problem right now, even though it isn't a constant issue, is being angry. Not mad, not irritated, but ANGRY. It's a scary feeling, because I don't have much (if any) experience with true anger and I don't like it. I can be rolling along, feeling fine, and then it hits me and I find myself standing there shaking and wanting to hurt people. It ruins my day. I know I could never hurt any of them as bad as they did me, but I want to try. I want to make them suffer and I hate the way that feels. I now understand why wrath is one of the 7 deadly sins, because it feels evil. However, I'm working on dealing with the anger and I think I'm doing OK. Please don't think I'm going to wind up on a roof with a sniper rifle or anything like that, though. :) Apparently it is a level of the grief process, which our counselor said I would go through, and that it's normal, but I really hope it goes away soon. I pray for the anger to be taken away and to be given charity, like it says in 1 Corinthians 13, in its place. I'm certain that I'll have that in time. I just wish it was soon.

Other than that, things seem to be going OK. We have good days and not so good days, but we are both trying to figure out how to do the things for each other that need to be done. It's an ongoing process and there is always the chance we just can't fix it, but so far so good. I'm kind of a basket case at times, but honestly, I believe I have the right to be. Don't you?

I know that some of you don't understand why I didn't just leave and take everything with me, but that never seemed like the right thing to do, to me at least. On TV and the movies, it seems so cut and dried. When something like that happens, there is nothing you can do but turn your back and walk away. However, it wasn't like that for me at all. I had so many people giving me advice and telling me what I should do, I just ended up confused. It's not that I didn't appreciate the advice, and it wasn't that it was bad advice (most of it was excellent, actually), but I knew I'd eventually have to make up my own mind about how to deal with things no matter what I was told. After many "dark nights of the soul" I finally just had to tell God to take it, because I couldn't deal with it anymore. I couldn't deal with it mentally, physically or emotionally any longer or I probably would have literally gone insane. When I finally lay it down, things began to get easier. I believe that we are doing the right thing at this point, and not just because it was what I originally wanted. It's not easy. I know that quite a few of you who read this blog don't really believe in God and probably think I've deluded myself into following this path out of some kind of martyr's obligation. I can respect that, I guess. It's not true, but I can respect it. I just also hope that you realize I'm not nearly as naive as that. :)

Anyways, enough of that. I just wanted to get that out of the way so that I can hopefully move on and write about nice things here again. I miss being silly and would like to get back to it as soon as I can.

This amuses me.

Hello! I hope no one is offended if they tried to call or e-mail me last week. Steve and I went on a trip to Myrtle Beach, so I was kind of out of pocket. I wasn't ignoring you, I promise. We just needed to get away for a few days, and we did. It was nice.

The trip went really well. We stayed in a nice place called Carribean Resort & Villas, which was one of the last hotels on the shore before you get to the private sea-side houses (one of which I'm going to live in one day...hopefully) and it was much nicer than I was expecting. I thought that Myrtle Beach was just another cheesy beach town like Panama City, FL. Not that I'm saying Panama City doesn't have merits, but it is kind of skeezy in places. :) We were there from Tuesday to Friday, so we even missed the weekend traffic. It was quiet, with things winding down from the tourist season, but we did manage to get there right in the middle of the Biker Convention. Fortunately or unfortunately, none of the bikers asked me to be their old lady, but there's always next year!

I got up super early on Wednesday morning to watch the sun rise over the ocean. I couldn't find anything on TV that would tell me what time the sun was supposed to come up, so I finally just went down with my chair and waited it out. It was beautiful, and I got a lot of nice pictures of the sun coming up. I'll post a few here later on. I watched the sun come up, took pictures for myself, took pictures for an elderly couple who wanted to be together in front of the sunrise, and collected shells. There weren't that many nice shells out this time of year, at least not ON the beach, but I found quite a few I liked. I'm a scavenger. Don't judge me. It wasn't all lovely, though. When I was getting ready to go back inside, I felt something hit me, but didn't think anything of it. It was only later, when I was putting away some clothes, that I noticed that a sea gull pooped on me and that is what I felt hit me. I mean seriously, there were only about 6 seagulls out there, there were dozens of people, and it pooped on me. Figures. I also managed to get attacked by a fairly unusually large wave. Steve was watching me get into the water, and I'm not kidding when I say that the biggest wave I'd seen all day rose up righteous and body slammed me into a bed of broken sea shells and drug me along. It probably didn't take that long for me to get free and get back on the beach, but it felt like I was tossed around for an hour. I had sand and crushed sea shells in places that I didn't realize I had, enough sand in my bathing suit bottoms to build a castle, and I don't know how I did it, but the top of my suit was filled with tiny sea shells, too. Steve was laughing at me when I finally got out and struggled back to our beach chairs, but he stopped when he realized I was bleeding from two very abraded places on my left leg. Those hastared shells were SHARP. I managed not to bleed on too much, but I stayed out of the ocean after that. We spent the rest of our outdoor time that day in the pool and in the lazy river that our hotel had. I am also not sure what kind of seashells got into my suit and on to my skin, but they stuck tight and wouldn't come off. It took me almost two showers to get all of them off. I was still finding pieces of the shells in my hair over the next two days!

Wednesday was also the one year anniversary of when my father died, and I don't know what it says about me, but I was glad not to be at home. I spent that morning thinking about him while I walked on the beach. It made me think of the rare times my family got to go on vacation, so they were good thoughts. It helped not being at home where the memories were much less pleasant, even though I probably should have been near my mom and sister. I got to grieve for him in my own way, so I'm not sorry.

We spent the rest of our trip just relaxing, eating, and shopping. I finally got to go to a World Market and a Ripley's Aquarium! We also ate at a place called "The Melting Pot" which was nice, but kind of expensive. I joked with Steve that it was probably the only time I could ever convince him to cook his own dinner. :) It was a really nice trip and I think it helped being away from things for a few days. We got some important talking done, which was good, and we just used the time to try and have fun together, which we did. It was a good trip.