MORE RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) I'm going to attempt to get my hair cut next week. Keep me in your thoughts and prayers.

2) Everything still sucks. I actually think I feel worse about it now than I did two weeks ago. I am, however, going to be 100% respectful of whatever things need to be done to fix it. 

But I've never been in a scorched earth situation before, so I'm not sure of the etiquette beyond the obvious. Am I blocked from everything? What if someone dies? Can I say happy birthday? What if I misdial or text the wrong person by accident, or am I blocked there too? I'm too scared to find out. What if there is an emergency or something important happens? I've never been the bad guy before and it's very weird. Until I hear differently, all I will do is nothing. I hate it.

I wonder how long I'll feel this sad, lost, and terrible? Probably long after everyone else is ok, I'd bet. Heh.

3) The person who bought the property next door went HAM and ripped out everything over the past two days. There is no lawn, no trees, and although we thought that the house was going to be sold and moved off property, it was simply crushed. I swear, it only took them 30 minutes to destroy it. I looked out of the window and it was there, and then walked out of the house half an hour later and it was nothing but a big pile of wood and bricks. They didn't even take the wreath off the front door first. It makes me weirdly sad.

I didn't know the people who lived there, but Steve grew up with the kids of the family. The house looked almost exactly like ours, but was on a slant on the lot. We learned a while back that it was the first house built in the subdivision and it belonged to the son of the developer. They positioned the house so that his family would have a clear view of the beautiful valley we live in while the other houses were being built, which I think is kind of cool. 

They are going to build one of those big McMansions on the property that will sell, unless the housing market crashes beforehand, for close to a million dollars. It's weird to think that property where we live could get something like that, but with a big, fancy house on the lot, it can. It's going to make our house look even worse by comparison, I'm afraid. There are only about 3 houses where we live that haven't been extensively remodeled or torn down and rebuilt, so our little 1959 ranch house is going to look like a hobbit hole next to whatever gorgeous, trendy thing that will be built next to us. 

I hope the new neighbors will be nice, but if they aren't, I'll just sunbathe nude, fall, winter, spring and summer, until they move. 

4) The people who work with Steve and trying to talk us into getting a dog. They know how much we love dogs, but they are being weirdly relentless about it. I don't like the pressure of it.

I've tried being coy about it, and joking about why we can't right now, but I wound up just being honest and telling them that I still miss my other dogs too much, and that the thought of getting a new dog or dogs makes me too sad, but they don't seem to understand that. Some people can just replace pets the second the other ones die, but I'm not like that. It hurts too much to love things that will just die and rip your soul out when they're gone. Butler and Bear were my boys. Simba wasn't even officially our cat, and it still makes me cry to think about her being gone. I know one day that we will have other pets, but they'll have to be snuck into the house under the cover of darkness and I will have to be told "this is your pet now."

I don't know how to politely tell them to stop bothering us about it. They're good people that I like and I know they mean no harm. But I wish they'd stop.

5) Twitter is sometimes a very weird place.

I was checking my followers the other day and noticed someone that I didn't recognize. I don't have many followers in general so I know who is there and who is gone. This guy was new.

I clicked on his name to see if it was someone I knew - I did not - and saw he had posted a series of photos. I looked at them, then looked again, and then looked again. I finally realized that they were all photos of his privates.

I don't know what it says about him that I couldn't recognize what I was looking at at first, or even second, glance, but the thing that actually threw me weren't the photos of his junk, but that he was wearing a Spider Man costume with the crotch cut out.

I'm sure there is a whole section of the population that might be into that kind of thing, and I won't judge, but I (fortunately or unfortunately) am not one of them. 

I did not follow him back, in case you're wondering. Geez.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) So I got to call 911 for the 6TH time at the church last Sunday! They don't even ask me my mane anymore. Soon, they are going to install a big, red button next to my desk that patches me right into the system.

One of our elderly ladies, who has some balance issues, fell while trying to walk between two pews and her cane tripped her. At least I think that's what happened. I was in the room, but was behind the sound equipment so I only heard the commotion. When I looked up, a bunch of people had surrounded her, and so I hung back until I heard someone say "She needs an ambulance!" So I jumped up, told them I'd call, and did the thing. Thankfully I'm an old pro at it by now, so I knew what to tell them. They had me go back (I'd been in the lobby so I could hear better) and sit by her so I could answer some questions. 

When an old person falls, usually my guess is that they are going to hurt a limb, or their back, or maybe break a hip. This lady had done none of those things. She was laying in a pool of blood. One of our deacons had a cloth pressed to the back of her head, but the blood had spread in a big pool under her head. She'd clipped the edge of the pew when she went down, and damn, scalp lacerations are no joke. 

She was lucid and not in much pain. Other than the bleeding, she said she was OK. Of course, when you're 85 years old and you hit your head, you never know. I sat next to her and made a few jokes to keep things from being too serious, and the EMTs finally showed up. They checked her out, and it didn't look like she was in any immediate danger, so they got her into a wheelchair and got her to the ambulance. I'd had to call the lady's daughter, and I have no idea if I was comforting or alarming, because adrenaline hit me like a ton of bricks when I went into "HELP THE OLD LADY" mode. 

Once she was out of the way, I shooed the looky-loos away and told them I'd clean up. That is part of my job, after all. There was a lot of blood. A. Lot. Of. Blood. More blood than I'd ever seen outside of the human body before. Thankfully, blood doesn't bother me, but it was still gruesome to have to carry out an armload of bloody towels in front of the entire congregation. When I woke up that morning, I hadn't imagined that I'd spend the first part of the day wrist deep in an old lady's blood. I didn't have any gloves, to which one of our church members helpfully pointed out that I needed them because this was, and I quote, "A bye-yo hazard." All I could do was promise I wouldn't lick my fingers. I did find out later I had a cut on my hand, so who knows how that will end up. I hope that lady doesn't have anything communicable.

I felt like Lady Macbeth the rest of the day. I still don't know if my hands are really clean yet, even though I scrubbed them. 

The lady is fine, by the way. She's a tough old bird. She called and said they'd put seven staples in her scalp, and she's staying with family until she gets better.

2) I deleted what I wrote here, because I forgot I wasn't going to say anything else about it. I'm too lazy to renumber. Everything still sucks, though. I hate every minute of it.

3) I found another pair of the giant underpants in the laundry, again. This is getting stupid! I know I washed and folded them all by this point, and there was no reason for them to be in the laundry four months after the fact! If it was a joke, Steve wouldn't let it go on this long. I think I'm going to have to burn them, or bring them to church and bury them under one of the shrubs. If I find one more pair in a place where they shouldn't be, I'm taking them to the closest priest and having them exorcised. I wonder how that would go?

4) My weight loss journey is going well. People are finally able to tell that I've lost some weight, which is nice. I'm still so tired all the time and eating sucks. I miss being able to comfort eat, or at least enjoy food! I don't anymore. I can't even watch cooking videos anymore without feeling nauseous. Right now, even the food I can eat, I don't want. But, I have to eat or I'll die. Allegedly. Geez. It's all supposed to level out in a few more months, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Oh! Another fun effect of my surgery is that my hair is falling out! I'm sure there are people out there who'd be thrilled to hear that, but I'm a little scared. I knew it was going to happen, but I didn't realize to what extent. I can only hope it won't be too terrible. I don't know to what to expect. I've thought about going and getting my hair cut short, just so it might not be such a shock if a lot more falls out, but I hate my hair being short. Ugh. Again, what can you do? 

Will you still love me if I'm bald? Even if my head is a weird shape? Even if I have to wear bad Hannah Montana wigs? Just don't let Chris Rock make any jokes. I don't think Steve would take up for me.

BROKEN

I fucked up.

I fucked up and ultimately destroyed one of the oldest, most important, precious to me, dear relationships I have ever had and I can't do anything about it. 

I'm not going to elaborate. I don't really even understand all the details. Suffice it to say that something that seemed fun, silly, and harmless wasn't. I should have been smarter, but ultimately I didn't want to be. I hate myself for it. Losing my friend was the one damn thing I didn't want to happen. I tried to explain but I don't think my message made it to the right place.

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, my heart is genuinely broken. I don't want to eat, I can't think straight, my body physically hurts, and I forget to breathe. I feel the same way as I did when my father died. If I had my way, I'd sleep until it didn't hurt anymore. I know one day I won't feel like this, and somehow that's worse, because it'll be like it didn't really matter at all, and it does. I feel like I've lost part of myself.

Everyone else involved will be fine. I have no doubt. They always are. I doubt anything truly bad ever happens to them these days. They're too perfect. That's a good thing, though.

My only hope is, at this point, that maybe it won't have to be forever, but it'll be a long time.

You might think I'm over reacting. If so, then you probably don't know me or my heart very well.

That's all I've got to say about that.