ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DREAM

Y'all, I have been having the weirdest, most vivid dreams for the past week.  I haven't been eating chocolate before going to bed or anything like that, so I'm not sure where these dreams are coming from.  I'm constantly being woken up by weird ass dreams these days.

One was disturbing, and I don't want to describe it because it was too scary, but it has stuck with me because it didn't feel like anything I'd normally dream.  It was very political and linear and made too much sense, so it was like I was inside someone elses head and that has bothered me all week. It was like having a movie of the week beamed into my head.

In one I was invited to go on this big bicycle trip with dozens of people. I didn't know anyone who was going, but I thought it sounded fun, so I agreed.  Since I didn't have any gear, they were going to loan me what I needed.  We walked to the start or the trip and they gave me a bike, but it didn't have any handlebars. I looked up to tell someone and they were all gone! The bastards had left me on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere! I had to McGyver some handlebars out of a stick so I could get back to the closest convenience store, and it turned out that the cyclists had trashed the place before they left so I couldn't even call anyone to come and get me. I think I may have a latent distrust of people who wear that much Spandex.

Last night I dreamed I was acting as a sort of ambassador for a group of people from Norway. I don't know how I got involved in this thing, but I had to be driven way up into some mountains to meet them. When I got there, I found out that the group of people weren't people.  They were octopi.  A huge group of pale, white octopi from Norway.  Not only that, but when I got out of the car, one of them suddenly flew through the air and latched themselves onto my face and around my body.  So an Albino Norwegian Cephalopod Facehugging Creature tried to eat me, or hug me. I have no idea. That's when I decided that I didn't want to be asleep anymore and woke up.

Sleeping is overrated anyway. I don't think I'm going to do it anymore.

AN UPDATE

My brother's surgery went well and he's finally home and resting.  I'm sure he's still sore and he doesn't seem to feel all that great, but I'm sure when someone goes rooting around in your insides with a robot, it's going to take a bit of a toll on you.

We stayed at the hospital for what seemed like forever on Friday and poor Tommy was not happy when he woke up in a strange place.  The staff was very kind to them, though, and he was well taken care of.  He had to stay an extra day due to some slight concerns, but they let him go home Sunday afternoon with no problems.  My mom said that when she got him home, and he'd had time to sleep a while, she walked into his room and he woke up.  He looked around, looked at her, and smiled really big because he seemed to realize that he was finally at home! :)  He's still got several weeks of recovery time, but as of right now, he's doing well.

Thank you to everyone who got in touch to check up on him, and who prayed and sent happy thoughts and all of that.  I really appreciate it and I'm sure the rest of my family does too!

PS: I met the doctor who did his surgery and he seemed very nice, but I can't help but picture him using the controls of the surgical robot like he was playing an Xbox!  I hope be topped his high score, at least.

A QUICKY

I just wanted to let you know that my brother's surgery will be this Friday.

Imma ask again for prayers, or whatever it is you fine people throw out into the universe, for my brother and my mom and the rest of us, as this is a rather scary type of thing and we'd all like to have him back home and feeling much better as soon as possible!

See...I knew I could count on you guys!

Also, have a lovely day and consider yourself hugged*.  :)


*If we haven't formally met, I give hella good hugs. Don't be scared.  (I can get you references if you need them.)

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) The other day I was having a conversation about death.

Oh, yeah, sorry, this is an odd one.

Anyway, I was having a conversation about death and my friend said that (in the full course of time, obvs) he hoped his wife would die before him.  I was a little shocked, but he said that he was worried that his wife would be sad if she was left alone and he was worried about her being taken care of financially.  So...even though that sounds kind of awful, I suppose it's chivalrous in a creepy, morbid sort of way.

As for me, this conversation pretty much revealed that I am a complete narcissist. I thought about it a minute and I realized that I don't mind going first, if that's what has to happen.  I know Steve can take care of himself given the opportunity, and I can't be 100% certain he won't meet his next wife at my funeral (the time between being a widower and getting remarried with people I know seems to be short these days.) So, you know, mozel tov and all that, because I know he'll probably be OK.  My problem is that life will go on and I won't be there and it'll be just fine.

Not that I'd want people to do the whole sackcloth and ashes bit, or anything like that (she felt compelled to explain) and I'd want everyone I know to be happy and fulfilled and all, but the idea that you can just die and life goes on and people who love you can just go on and live perfectly fine without you is sad to me in a way.  It's kind of a weird feeling because I know in my heart that I'd want everyone I love to be happy and live good lives, but this selfish little part of me hates the idea of  being a footnote.  Of course, I kind of have that fear while being alive too, I guess.  You know, when you have friends and they lose touch, and then you only realize years later than they were OK without you even though you both existed in the same point in time and could have been in contact easily?  Buuuuuut, I also have a very bad habit of overestimating my importance in situations and relationships, so I can kind of see where all this comes from! :)

Haha, I don't mean for this to be depressing, I swear, I was just really surprised at myself for feeling like that.  I don't think I'd ever thought about it in those terms much before.  I suppose you never get too old to learn things about yourself, but damn, I wish it had been a nicer thing to learn!

So, you know, if I die, don't forget about me.  Please. Ok?  :)

2) You'll be completely uninterested in knowing that I finally changed my profile picture on my Facebook account to one that had been taken recently! I feel guilty about it because Butler was in my old picture and it feels disloyal to take that once down.  Good Lord, loving a pet can do weird things to a person.

I'm sure Butler wouldn't mind.  (Bear, on the other hand, would have been PISSED.)

3) Saturday afternoon Steve and I went to a a joint concert for the Georgia Brass Band and the Huntsville Brass Band.  We don't usually go to things like this unless Steve is playing in it, but this was a special concert because my former band director would be playing in the Georgia Brass Band and he invited a bunch of his former students!

Let me clarify.  I had 3 band directors.  My first one had been there since the 60s and she got tired of it and switched over to teaching computer classes.  My second one was very nice and was only there for a year because of the kind of political BS that seems to follow teachers around like the plague, and my third one was a pervert who made me not like being in the band.  The one who was playing on Saturday was my second band director.

Anyway, so Steve and I went to hear them play.  Unfortunately for him, none of the other students showed up.  Just me.  I felt bad because he sounded so excited about being able to see his old students and it looked like a lot of them were eager to come to the concert, but all he got was me.  Eh, oh well.  The music was really great, and we found out when we got there that quite a few people in Huntsville's Brass Band were people we'd traveled to Ireland with last year, so it was nice seeing them again.  I got to talk with my teacher after his first set and after the concert all together and catch up a bit.  He is doing very well, although I found out that he was only a band director for two years in total.  One year at our school and one year in Georgia.  Apparently, he loved the music and teaching part, but hated the politics.  So he went back to school and he runs a small internet hosting company now.  Good for him!

There was one fairly unsettling thing that I realized while we were talking.  He's a trumpet player who has played for years and plays in volunteer type bands. He was always a fairly quiet, soft spoken man.  He also worked for several years in cyber security before switching over to another IT career.  As I stood there and watched as he chatted with Steve, I realized that essentially I married my high school band director.

Now I have to reevaluate my life.

4) Did you know that pineapples are suddenly a thing now?  I don't mean the actual fruit, but they are appearing on a lot of homegoods and patterns. Also, you can find lots of different kinds of pineapples to set around your house, inside and out. This is going to make things confusing for a whole subset of people. Silver lining, it could lead to people making some interesting new friends! ; )

UGH. MORE FEELINGS

Today I woke up out of a dead sleep in a complete panic. 

I've been waking up this way, every day, for going on almost three months now.  I wrote a post about this a bit ago and I'd hoped that things would ease up, but they haven't.  It's not just a brief feeling of panic that goes away quickly, but something that starts almost the minute that I open my eyes and just gets worse until I manage to climb out of bed and force myself to think of other things while I'm getting ready for work. Even then, it follows me around.  I HATE IT.

I decided to try and figure this out when it had been going on for a few weeks.  If I could understand what is bothering me enough to cause the panic attack, maybe I could fix that and make it stop.  So I started to keep a mental log every morning when it happened to try and get a better understanding of it. But it isn't that cut and dry. When I first wake up, I'm not thinking of anything in particular, especially not anything that would be worrying me. Almost immediately my hands and chest start to tingle, my heart starts to race, I can't breathe, I get hot all over and my skin starts to crawl.  There is literally no thought in my head causing it, it just starts for no reason. However, apparently the way my brain works is like it's thinking "Ok, I'm panicking, and I can't panic without a reason! Here is a reason!" and then the things that bother me come crashing in on me.  And the stuff I am suddenly anxious about, like: I worry about my brother's surgery and if it will be successful and how my mom is going to handle it, or the fact that I have a close friendship that seems to have changed in some fundamental way that I don't understand with zero explanation and that concerns me, or that I have another very good friend who is sick and  may not get better, not to mention my general job situation.  All of those things are certainly things that are concerning, but none of them should be waking me up in a blind panic in the morning and following me around all day.

Look, I know I sound crazy.  I know this.  Thing is, I don't really think this is a thing that is all in my head.  The fact that I'm waking up tabula rasa and still in a panic, before the thought of the day crashes in on me, must mean that something physical is going on, right?  Some kind of weird chemical thing?  I don't know. I should probably see a doctor, but what do I say?  If something hurts, that's easy to explain, but when you say "constant panic attacks" all they want to do is drug the personality out of you.  I hope that doesn't happen. 

Sigh.  Anyway, sorry to complain.  I just hate feeling like this.  I'd like to feel normal again and not worry beyond what a normal person does.  I know people who don't give a damn about anything, or if they do, they don't let it get to them too badly.  I wish I could be like that.  I stopped trying to avoid feeling stuff and look what happened!  Feelings are bullshit.  I was right.  People don't have patience with your feelings.  They don't want to hear about them and they certainly don't want to get involved. They just avoid you til you feel better, or at least until you stop talking about them.  I don't want to bother people.  I know I'm bothering you right now, gentle reader, but I'd like to think that if you are here, you care a little bit. Heh. 

Thank you for listening.  I hope this goes away soon.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1)  You know, I realize that the last couple of entries on this blog have been stories from a long time ago.  I didn't really think about it much when I was writing them, but just to let you know, it's because nothing interesting is going on with me at the moment.  Not a complaint, exactly, but I do enjoy writing on this blog and I haven't had anything fun or interesting happen in a while to write about.  Please indulge me my ramblings until things start happening again.  Hopefully they will be good and funny things and we can laugh and laugh.  Laughing is my favorite. :)

2) Let me preface this entry with a disclaimer: I am not trying to make Steve look bad. I promise. I thought this was funny.

Steve and I were driving home from church and I was telling him a story I'd recently read about a husband going out of his way to do something nice for his wife. I just thought it was a nice story, and I had no ulterior motives for telling him about it (and the fact that I feel the need to clarify that makes me sad.) I really just thought it was a nice story.  Steve thought for a minute and said "You know, I'd do something like that for you." I said "Wait, when I did that similar thing a couple of years ago, you didn't offer help me with it." Without hesitation, he said "Well, that's because I didn't want to."  He didn't understand why I thought that was so funny.

Never change, Steve.

3) I'm going to admit to something that is going to make me sound super grinchy.  Decorating for holidays seems like such a huge waste of time to me.  I'll give a pass to Christmas, because Christmas is considered a "Season" and people have multiple parties and guests, and I like Christmas trees in general.  However, people who decorate for holidays like Easter or the 4th of July, or things like that, confuse me.  Do they literally not have anything better to do than pack and unpack themed household items for just one day of celebrating? People will literally buy entire sets of dishes shaped like eggs or painted with turkeys.  I know this because I worked at Pier 1 for a while and we sold all that stuff, and people ate it up.   It's not even the expense that bothers me, it's the bother.

Maybe my issue isn't that I'm grinchy, but that I'm lazy.  I bet it's because I'm lazy.

A QUICKIE

I was just kidding!  I'm not going to tell you about my best date!

Why am I even clarifying?  I started feeling a bit icky about even mentioning it.  I may not be a particularly private person, but I don't need to tell everything.

Don't worry, it wasn't a salacious story or anything (ALAS...sigh...heh), but the retelling would kind of make it...less, if that makes any sense.  I will just say that the guy was super great, we only went out a few times, and an attempt at tennis may or may not have been involved.  It was just a very good day.

Besides, memories like that are like really nice chocolates.  You savor them on special occasions and you very rarely share. :)

MY WORST DATE

Sometimes when I get bored at work, I'll go to "Askreddit" and poke around for a while.  It's not exactly the most highbrow of all reading material, I suppose, but it's fun to read answers to the questions from lots of different kinds of people and it passes the time that I'd otherwise be using to stare at the ceiling and question my life choices! :)

Yesterday someone posted the question "What was your worst date?" or something similar.  I read through a lot of them, which made me cringe in sympathy for many of those strangers. In the process I remembered my own worst date, which I hadn't thought about in years. Well, I call it the worst date, but that might be a bit dire.  It was certainly the weirdest and most awkward date I can remember though, and that has to count for something!

I never dated a ton.  I had boyfriends that tended to stick around for a while when I had them, but I didn't go on "single-serving" dates much at all.  That's what happens when you live in a small community. Your dating pool is a bit more limited than it might otherwise be, so unless you wanted to pass around boyfriends like trading cards (and to be fair, some of that did go on at my high school, heh) you didn't get a wide range of folks to date.  That's not to say that there wasn't a lot of really great guys that I knew, but I went to a K-12 school and basically grew up with most of them and I was good friends with a lot of them which would have made dating weird.  You know how it is.

Anyway, I digress.

Once I graduated high school and ventured beyond the borders of my community (like the Viking Adventuress I was always meant to be, I guess) I did meet a few nice guys and went out on a couple of those single-serving dates.  Most of them were fine.  There's a reason you only go out with some people once or twice, obviously, but none of those dates were really all that memorable.  The one in question was one of the last dates I went on before I started dating Steve seriously.

I'm going to call this guy Ben (to protect the innocent.)  I met him while working at the Sprocket (ptooey) and he was not, strictly speaking, my type.  Ben was a tall, gangly guy; a former basketball player from one of the rich-kid neighboring county schools, and he was very....enthusiastic...about everything.  Imagine a morning show radio DJ crossed with a personal trainer.  But he was sweet, though, and funny, and also not gay - which due to recent experience was an important detail for me at that point in time.  I don't remember how he asked me out, just that suddenly we had a date one night.  Ok, then!

We met at work and our adventure began!  We went to dinner, although I can't remember where.  I'm sure it was one of those places young people went at the time, like Olive Garden or Applebee's.  The reason I don't remember where we went wasn't because it was boring, but because I spent most of the meal watching in horror as Ben destroyed his dinner in a manner I generally associate with Great White sharks.  See, Ben had braces.  I don't know if you've ever had braces, but eating can be difficult because you have to learn to eat in a way that you don't get food, or your lips, caught in the things.  His technique was to chew with his mouth WIDE open, which allowed anyone sitting on the opposite side of the table to see whatever he was eating floating around inside his mouth like clothes in a glass door washing machine. He also liked to talk while he ate, so the food not only swished around in his wide open maw, but bits of it would fly out and land on the table.  There was ranch dressing involved.  *shudder*

Next we went on a walking tour of downtown Huntsville, at night, to look at church windows or some such thing.  You guys know I love stained glass windows, but the churches were all dark inside, so we were basically walking around in the dark in places that (I know now) aren't all that safe.  Now, I like the idea of walking around and looking at architecture very much, but A) I'd like to be doing it in a place where I wouldn't get mugged, B) I'd like to be able to see what we're looking at and C) he never told me what we'd be doing, so I was wearing tall sandals that weren't made for walking long distances, so my feet were killing me after a couple of blocks and I kept tripping. He seemed oblivious of the situation and I was too shy to say anything about it, so we just kept on walking.

Lastly we decided to go and see a movie.  It was a sequel to a movie I'd never seen before, but I didn't want to complain because he seemed psyched for it.  It was a movie about dinosaurs.  Anyway, even thought I didn't really know what was going on with the movie, it wasn't all that bad. I was able to rest my feet a bit, which was nice. He also wasn't trying to put his hands on me in any, which was good, but that made what happened next even stranger.  During a part of the movie that was supposed to be "Scary" he grabbed me in a headlock. It wasn't a "he had his arm around me and it tightened a bit" sort of thing, but a legit out-of-nowhere headlock and he pulled me across the armrest of my chair.  It has been suggested, by one person or another, that Ben was trying to get in on some of that "Alanis Morrisette Theater Action," if you know what I mean, but I don't think that was it.  If so, it would have been the strangest 0 to 60 that I'd ever witnessed.  He also wasn't trying to kiss me or anything like that, he just seemed to think it was appropriate to put his date in a sudden headlock during the movie.  I was too stunned to do anything, but he let me go pretty soon afterwards.  Unfortunately, in that strange scuffle, one of my earrings disappeared.  Steve's dad* had gone to Italy on a work trip and had brought me back a pretty pair of silver and blue earrings, and when I realized one was missing, I was pissed.  Put me in a headlock for some reason I can deal with, but I felt terrible to have lost part of a gift, so for the next few minutes, we scrabbled around on a dirty theater floor looking for it all to no avail.  After the movie was finished, Ben drove me back to the SpRocket (ptooey) and  left me at my car, and unless I'm mistaken, he was completely oblivious that we had just had the strangest, most tone deaf date in my whole history of dating!  He didn't try to kiss me goodnight, thank goodness, because I was still having flashbacks to him eating dinner and I'm fairly certain I would have thrown up.  Ben and I did not go out again.

For all I know, I was his worst date, too.  I can hear it now "She barely talked at dinner, she lagged behind me the whole time I was trying to show her the church windows, AND she didn't seem to have a clue what to do when I put her in the 'First Date Headlock!' Such a waste of time.  Duuuuuude."  (Yeah, I'm pretty sure he would have added the dude.)

The strangest part of the whole night was when I got back home and was changing for bed.  The earring that I lost in the theater was in my bra.  Not just, like, hooked on to it, but way down inside one of the cups of my bra, and y'all, I was wearing a turtleneck sweater that night and Ben didn't get his hands inside that sweater, so how did my earring get inside of it?  As weird as that night was, I can only assume it was aliens.

So that was the, if not worst, certainly the most uncomfortable date I'd ever gone on.  One day, maybe I'll tell you about the best one. SPOILER: It wasn't with Steve!  Shhhhh, don't tell.  He doesn't read my blog!

*Yes, I was sort of dating Steve already when I went out with Ben. I was unaware at the time we were not supposed to be dating other people.  That was an awkward conversation.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING: THINKLINGS

1) What is a thinkling, you may ask?  It's a subject that is not as long as a usual blog entry, but has the potential to get out of control if I wanted to expound on it.  Probably could be a tweet, if I was being honest, but I'm here and not there, so...there you go.

2) The stolen money from my bank account has been returned!  Woot!  I checked this morning, and all of it was returned thanks to the fraud unit of REDFCU!  Too bad that I'll never know the identity of the person who stole it, because that person deserves to be tied to a tree and hit with a bat, but maybe just around the knees.  The only problem I'm still having is that I still don't have regular access to my account yet, but thankfully I don't have anything pressing at the moment (knock wood) and it shouldn't be much longer before that is cleared up.

3) Steve told me that I can be a smothery person.  Like, if I like/care about a person, I'm a bit too in their face. I go way overboard trying to be friendly or doing stuff for them. That probably sounds mean, but he wasn't being hateful, I promise.  He was just stating a fact as he saw it. I can respect that.  I didn't realize. Sorry if I've done that to you, but at least you know it's because I like you and not because I want to wear your skin like a coat or anything weird like that!  So, the outcome of this is that all the headway I've made towards being less nervous about texting people or sending unsolicited emails has been set back a bit. Sigh. Maybe I'll just give up and become a hermit. Hermits don't talk to people too much and bother them. Hermits live in caves and make friends with crickets.

4) I almost set the church microwave on fire this morning! I was heating up my breakfast and I put my container in the thing and turned it on.  Big, loud, green fireworks started going off inside the microwave!  It scared the crap out of me.  When I rescued my food, luckily it wasn't burnt (wasn't cooked either, but not burnt) I saw that apparently I didn't notice that I didn't get all of the foil off of the edge. I haven't done anything like that since we had our first microwave in 1986!  I sacrificed a good couple of Pop-Tarts that day, I can tell you.

5) I ate fish eggs for the first time this past Saturday!  I know, I know, just by looking at me you'd think I was so refined that I certainly must eat caviar on the reg, but surprisingly that isn't the case. Steve and I went out to lunch and he ordered sushi (BLERF). It had some fish eggs on top of it and I was curious to know what they tasted like.  Not good, would be my answer. They were tiny and had a neat texture, but they were salty and a little fishy and the texture/taste don't match enough to be a good thing.  I don't know if I'll try it again, so if you were thinking about sending me some expensive caviar as a gift, please channel your generosity towards some quality chocolates instead. Thank you in advance.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) So, you know how I mentioned a couple of entries ago about the whole "Life ain't gonna work out the way I hoped/thought it would" thing? It's so much harder than I thought it would be to let that go.

Heh, I know that doing/thinking anything for 15 years is going to become a habit, but geez, I kind of figured that once the realization hit, it would be a lot easier.  Alas, no, I still hold on to some hope, mostly of the subconscious type, and somehow that makes me feel even more foolish than I did before.  UUUUUUUGH.  I think if the whole thing had been a bit more ridiculous (like my dream of fighting zombies with an aging black cat and saving the world as I bike across country to the west coast) this wouldn't be so hard.

I guess subconsciously, I don't really want to give it up.  I don't know.  I need to.  SIGH.  Anyway, I suppose this poster I found online says it more succinctly than I can:

It's inevitably going to fail, but I'll hang on for now I guess. Damnit.

Sometimes being an optimist suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

2) I've got an update on my brother, and thank all of you that sent up a prayer or vibes, or whatever you people out there do.  

My mom talked to the first surgeon and he refused to do the originally proposed surgery.  He said that it was way too risky, and with my brother's health being the way it is, there was a very high chance that he wouldn't survive.  However, he was going to need to have at least some kind of surgery, or he wouldn't survive anyway.  So...you know...that's great for a mom to hear, right?  However, the first surgeon referred them to a second doctor that specializes in robotic surgery, who figured out a way to do what needed to be done, but way less invasively and with a much shorter healing time.  As far as we know, his surgery will be at the end of this month, so please keep on praying or doing what you do, for both my brother and my mom, because it will still be a scary procedure with a certain amount of risk involved. 

Silver lining, though, is that it can be done and, if done successfully, will help him feel a lot better!

3)  Oh, y'all...

Last night, after I'd gone to bed, I was lying there reading something on my iPad (as one does) when I realized that I needed to charge the thing before going to sleep.  I sat up and reached for the remote for the overhead light so that I could turn it on and find the charging cable.  The remote is located on a shelf built into the headboard, and only required me to sit up and hit one button. Now, I know that I was solidly on the bed, and I know that I didn't intend to shift or turn or do anything other than sit up, but somehow I managed to move in such a way that the mattress compressed, gravity took over, and I lost my balance.  

That might seem like a minor bump in the road for most people, but you need to understand the geography of my little corner of the bedroom.  The bed is big.  Not wide, like a king sized bed, but quite high and built like a waterbed because it sits on top of a wooden platform containing drawers. My side of the bed is also about arms length from the wall on which hangs a television, and in-between is a squatty little table where I keep stuff.  So were I to fall, there are many things on my body that would get tangled, folded, banged up, and probably concussed.  

It being dark, my mind got doubly confused about the physics of the situation, because I didn't have any way to orient myself. Time suddenly slowed down, in the way that it does just before disaster, and I had time for some very clear thoughts.  As I started to go over the side this is what ran through my head:

I'm falling off the bed.

Wait, what? I'm FALLING OFF THE BED!

I'M A GROWN ASS WOMAN AND I'M FALLING OFF OF THE BED! I can't do that!  That's what little kids do!

If I fall off the bed I might die, because I know I'm going to fold in half and hit my head on something and things are going to get scraped.  It's imperative that I DO NOT FALL OFF OF THE BED LIKE A TODDLER!

Oh, God, everything is going to hurt so badly when I hit the ground! 

Now imagine all of this happening in slow motion while I am madly teetering on the edge of the mattress trying to regain my balance (and if it helps the visual, imagine the music from "Inception" playing in the background.)  I went over the edge, my iPad went flying, and I don't know what sound I made, but it brought Steve from the other end of the house.  I didn't actually hit the floor, because I threw out my arm just in the nick of time and caught myself against the wall and managed to pull every muscle on that side of my body, but I did manage NOT to end up in a Celtic knot underneath my nightstand!  There was some collateral damage, though.  When my iPad flew out of my hands, it slammed against the edge of my side table and now the screen is borked, but I got a good laugh out of the whole situation, and isn't that the important thing in the end?  Haha!

MOTHER FORKING SHIRT BALLS!

OK, sorry about the title. I've had a frustrating day thus far, and working in a church keeps me from either cursing like Yosemite Sam or throwing furniture like I'd like to be doing right now.

I'm paranoid about my bank account.  Probably not as much as some people, but certainly more than other people might be.  I blame Steve and his hyper aware cyber-security self. Everyone knows when you shop online, you always run the risk of someone stealing your credit card/debit card info, and so I keep a fairly close watch on all that.  I've also got it set up so that any time something is directly charged to my bank account, I get a text message so that I will know immediately if something is amiss.

This morning I was just leaving for work when I happened to glance at my phone.  I saw that I had a text message alert from 1 AM for a charge to my account from iTunes.  I last bought a song on iTunes in mid March, and it wasn't for nearly the amount that was being shown in that text message.  Well....crap. 

When I got to work, the first thing I tried to do was check my iTunes account to see if I'd bought something and forgotten about it.  I tried to open the iTunes program on my work computer, but for some reason it kept crashing.  I don't know if you've ever really, really wanted to get into a program and couldn't, but I came very close to putting my head through my monitor.  I had to find another computer in a completely different part of the church to check my account.  I didn't see any charges there, so went online to look at my bank account more closely and saw that a second charge to iTunes had been added.  I was swiftly becoming untethered from my sense of humor!

 I called the bank to alert them and ask what to do.  The very nice lady I spoke to could see the charges, but couldn't tell me what they were for, which is understandable.  She said I could go ahead and cancel my bank card if I wanted, but that I should called Apple first and make sure it wasn't something easily explainable.  So I got online and started a chat with an online Apple representative. I thought that would be faster than waiting on the phone, and I was (thankfully) right.  The woman who came online to help me told me that she couldn't find any charges to my account, but that she would elevate my problem to the next level just to make sure.  I was fine with that, but I was getting antsy about getting back with the bank to cancel my card.  I got a call from a second rep from Apple asking me to verify my account and all that jazz, but he also couldn't find anything odd with my iTunes account.  However, he decided to elevate my problem to yet a third tier of customer service, which I agreed to.  I'll be honest, I almost hung up so I could contact the bank, but I felt like it would be rude to hang up on him, so I hung on the line while I contacted the bank online to cancel my card.  I'm very glad I did.  The next person I talked to was apparently an IT worker for Apple, and she was able to get into my account far enough to see that someone had hacked into it and was using my account to buy gift cards through a secondary email address!  Those bastards.  However, the silver lining is that the issue was identified and could be addressed. The IT woman's name who helped me was named Coni, and I could have kissed her right on the mouth at that moment. I'm completely impressed with the way they handled the situation, because you don't expect a huge company like Apple to have such good customer service.

So my account was adjusted, but I still had to go and change the passwords to my bank account, my iTunes account and my home e-mail, just to be on the safe side.  I also had to cancel my debit card and fill out paperwork for bank fraud, which may (or may not) allow for a refund of the money that was stolen from me.   Now I just have to get that mailed off and see if I'm going to be refunded for some jerk-face thief that decided I should be funding their iTunes in-app purchases or whatever.

All is well that ends well, though.  I am much calmer than I was before, but I'd still like to find whoever did that and rip their ears off.  Let's just hope I got a handle on all of this before my card is used for anything else.  Finger's crossed! 

WHAT NOW?

About 15 years ago, I got this idea about what I'd like my future to be like.  It wasn't anything I'd thought about much before, but sometimes your future plans just kind of occur to you out of nowhere, you know?  The idea came to me almost fully formed, and in my head it was a good thing.  A comfortable thing.  A thing I knew would be nice.

It wasn't like, where I'd like to be working, or living, or about kids, or about being famous one day (that wasn't something that lasted very long, haha) it was just this idea about where my life might go one day.  I knew it would have to be something I cultivated, or at least didn't ruin, (and to be fair, there were bumps along the way and maybe I didn't do everything just right) but it became such a particularly pervasive idea that I never even questioned it.  I was just convinced that one day, it would be.

I never told anyone about what I wanted, not even my closest confidant.  Even though I'm not a particularly private person, this one thing was just for me.  I'm not going to tell you what it is now (sorry) because it's still a very private sort of thing that I don't think I could explain, even if I wanted to. Even more so, anyone I told would think me foolish. Well, foolish or not, I believed in it so completely that I didn't even question it.  I'd catch myself thinking, "Well, when this happens..." as if it were already written in stone.  Call me an optimist!

BUT...

Over the last few weeks, it has occurred to me how stupid I've been.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's stupid to have plans, or to want things, or to even make plans for things that might be a bit fanciful, as long as it's rooted in some kind of reality.  My problem is that I what I wanted was technically rooted in reality.  Hell, it was fucking prosaic!  I think that's why I believed it so wholeheartedly. It's like wanting chocolate ice cream after dinner.  Chocolate ice cream is great, but it's a normal, boring thing. I wanted that, planned for that, only to realize that if I went to the store to get it that it was a certainty that chocolate ice cream wouldn't be for sale anymore. Heh. What I was looking for wasn't anything I could control, or even plan on. It was just something that I held on to because I liked the idea of it, and now, after all this time, it finally clicked that it wasn't going to happen.

Bleh, I know I'm not making much sense here and I'm sorry.  I'm not writing this because I'm depressed, or destroyed by the realization of it all.  I'm certainly sad, and maybe disillusioned, because who wouldn't be after believing in something for 15 years only to realize that it'll never happen.  Not even close.  Mainly, I just feel like an asshole.  I know that no one reading this can do anything about it, and no amount of platitudes will fix the way I feel.  I'm not even certain that my life would have benefitted from what I was looking for, except it felt like it would.  I'm writing about it because sometimes I think you need to let things out into the universe so that you can make some sense of them.  That's one of the reasons I like this blog.  It's mine and I can talk about whatever I want, and if you don't like it, you can go have sex with yourself. :)

Don't worry, my life isn't going to be ruined without this...direction...I was looking for.  At least I don't think so.  I think that there will always be a part of me that has some bit of hope that one day...far in the future, I might get a little taste of what I was looking for.  I'm sure something else will occur to me in time.  I just can't help but feel a little lost right now, and maybe a little empty.  A person can't believe in something for so long, and realize that they were wrong, for it not to leave some kind of scar.

So now I've got to figure out what is next.  That should be easy enough, right?  Haha!

What now, indeed.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) I had a nightmare last night!  It wasn't like one of my normal nightmares.  It was more realistic than any dream that I've had in a long time and it has stuck with me all day.  I"m going to write it down so I can get rid of it.

I dreamed that Steve and I went on a trip with a bunch of people we barely knew, kind of like when we went to Ireland. Almost the second we landed, we found out we were in a war zone, and we couldn't get back on the plane, so we had to follow this man into what looked like shopping mall.  The man said for us to follow him, and to do what he said and that we'd be safe.  We were safe, for a while, but I kept getting separated from everyone and mixed in with the local people, and then rejoin them later.  I was terrified, so I would do whatever the people in charge told me to, and we'd move from room to room of this place in order to get out.  At some point, I lost all of my stuff, I was completely cut off from everyone I came with, and some man I didn't know threw some clothes at me and told me that I had to pretend to be a local, and then he pushed me into the hallway and told me to make it back to the airplane on my own.  I had no idea where I was going, or what I was supposed to be doing, and I didn't know anything about the culture of the place where I was, so I had to make my way all the way back to where we had started from, all while trying to pretend I was someone I wasn't.  I also never found anyone I knew after that, so I was alone and so scared. I never made it back to the plane.  I think I might have gotten shot a couple of times, but that is when I woke up.

Haha, I used to have bad dreams where I'd have something important to say, and no one would listen to me.  Now I have nightmares about being left alone and confused. Abandonment issues much?   Seems like I'm going backwards somehow.

2) Friday afternoon turned out to be beautiful and bright.  I'm not normally an outdoors kind of person, but I'm trying to change that, at least before it gets so danged hot that I can't breathe.  So I took one of our folding chairs and sat in the backyard for a while.

I was crocheting and listening to an audio novel, and it was nice, but the house blocked the breeze and I ended up getting a bit too warm.  In March, y'all.  I only sat out there for about an hour or so before going back in again.  Things ended up getting a bit crazy by the end of the day, and so I didn't look into a mirror again until right before I went to bed, and that's when I found out that I was sunburned. Badly sunburned.  it looked like I'd spent a day on the beach!  I'd been wearing a V neck t-shirt, and my chest was bright red.  My arms weren't so bad, but the top of my head was burned, and my cheeks and nose were burnt, too.  It was crazy!  

It's only March, and I've already got tan burn lines!  I dread to think about how hot it's going to be this summer!  I'm determined to spend time outside, though!  Imma get me some vitamin d! :)

3) For anyone who prays, or maybe sends good vibes, if you wouldn't mind sending a few out to my brother, that would be awesome.  He got sick enough to have to go to the ER last week.  As you know, my brother can't talk, so trying to figure out what was wrong with him was hard to do.  They did a bunch of tests, and as it turns out, he has an internal birth defect that my family never knew about that is now causing some serious problems.  I won't go into detail, mainly because I don't understand it all, but he is going to have to have some major, fairly invasive, surgery to repair the problem.  The surgeon will basically have to open his chest to rearrange his organs.  It's going to be scary and hard to do.  Also send some prayers and vibes to my mom, too, because she is scared to death about all of this and is having to make some frightening decisions for my bro.  I'm sure she'd appreciate it.  We all would. Thank you in advance.

4) I love adult coloring books.  I really do.  I'm picky about the ones I buy, but I have a lot of them because the art is usually really spectacular.  I only have one problem.  I can't bring myself to actually color any of them!

I KNOW!

Part of the problem is that I feel weird coloring in a book.  I respect books.  Cutting them up or writing in them is weird for me.  Yes, even these coloring books, because these aren't like the pulpy ones we had when we were kids.  These are proper books!  The other problem is that I don't like using colored pencils or crayons to color with.  The color just isn't saturated enough for me and it makes me not like the finished image.  I have one book I tried to color in with markers, and the ink went right through the paper.  I literally have one red ladybug colored into an otherwise empty coloring book!  You'd think I'd quit buying them, but I don't.  I want to color them, but I don't want them to look bad! What can I do?  The only solution I've had so far was to make copies of the pages and color those, but the paper quality is bad, which makes it less fun to color.  Bleh.  I'm way too picky about this stuff for my own good, I think.

Artists.  Am I right? :)

BUTTON, BUTTON, WHO'S GOT THE...

One of the things I remember most clearly about being a little kid was visiting with my Grandmother Martin.  Maybe it's just mistaken, fuzzy, little girl memories, but it feels like I was at her house more often than I wasn't.  I never minded because I loved my grandmother a lot, and being there wasn't like being anywhere else that I knew.

She grew up hardscrabble, a daughter of sharecroppers, hard core country, but not in that redneck, NASCAR, pop-country music way that people think of as "country" these days.  She was born, lived, and died pretty much all in the same little patch of dirt in Limestone county, and I'm fairly certain that that was exactly the way she wanted things to be.

At her house there wasn't a room set aside, filled with plastic Fisher-Price junk for us grand kids to play with.  Nor did we haul bags of toys or video games back and forth when we visited.  When we were at Grandmother's house (and she would not be called Nana, Granny, or anything else except for Grandmother) we played cards, we played outside, in the barn, in the woods, or we found something she had stashed away to keep ourselves occupied, and boy did she have things stashed away.

Like a lot of people who lived through the depression, my Grandmother kept odd things.  She wasn't a hoarder or anything like that, but she was a very dedicated keeper of things that she thought might come in handy.  She also kept a treasure of "important" objects. It was through her, and the things that she kept in that tiny house of hers, that I developed a love of old things. I'm not talking about fancy antiques, although I can appreciate those on their own merits, but I'm talking more about old pieces of junk jewelry, old coins, old yearbooks, worn wooden tools, old quilts and other things that have stories attached to them. When my Grandmother passed away in 2006, I inherited quite a few of her special things.  It would probably seem like a lot of trash to anyone who didn't know her, but to me, they were all things that were special because SHE thought they were special.

One of my favorite things that she kept was an old, White Owl cigar box full of odd buttons.  I"m sure I've mentioned those buttons a time or two before.  When all of the grownups were in the kitchen talking and I was bored, I'd sometimes go and get that button box just to play with them.  That box had a specific sound, a very distinct smell, and it was endlessly fascinating to me for whatever reasons.  I'm sure they were all buttons from her family's clothes, and not things that she arbitrarily bought, so keeping them made sense. Divorced from their purpose, though, they became something much more interesting.  That box of buttons was the inspiration of my own, albeit less utilitarian, collection.

Whenever I go into a junk shop or an antique store, I always look for the jars of buttons.  Sometimes the ones you find aren't anything special.  It's hard to explain why that is, but you just have to have an eye for it.  Some jars came from people who were trying too hard to be "Shabby Chic" (bleh) and some are really just new buttons bought in a mix, like from a craft store.  The ones you want are the ones that make no sense all together.  There's no scheme, too many colors and shapes, maybe a little dirty, and usually in an old peanut butter or jelly jar. You can usually tell by looking closely if they are old, but sometimes you only find the good stuff once you open the jar.  Of course, I'm not EDUCATED on buttons.  I'm sure that there are people out there that could tell me if I had anything really valuable, but to be honest, I don't particularly care if they're valuable. I like them for other reasons.

I know that buttons must seem like such a silly thing to keep.  They are such ubiquitous things that most of us don't really think about, unless we lose one of course.  They are just a part of your everyday clothes, something you touch without thinking about them, but I think that's why I like them so much.  I like the idea of having something that was used, and that passed through a lot of hands to get to me.  Every time I get a new jar of buttons, I look at them one at a time and wonder where they've been.  I always separate them by color.

There are always more white buttons than any other color, which isn't surprising.  The plain ones got the most wear.  I like to imagine some grandfather's hands, buttoning up the same plain shirts every week to go to church, or maybe someone who had a job interview buying that shirt to look nice.  Some of the white buttons are made from mother-of-pearl, with traces of the oyster shell still visible on the back.  Some of them are tiny and feminine, and I wonder if they were on a long ago wedding dress, maybe a pair of gloves, or a baby's special outfit.

The neutral ones are second most plentiful.  Except for the ones made of wood or coconut shell, those are my least favorite.  It's hard to say why, except that I'm not fond of brown and gray, but occasionally you'll come across an interesting one.

The multicolored ones are my favorite, as they are the ones that are the most varied in size and shape.  I imagine most of these were from women's and children's clothes, or that there were some flashy guys out there back in the day.  There are huge buttons that I know had to have come off of someone's winter coat, and some that I know probably came from a woman's best Sunday dress.  Sometimes there is still a bit of material sewn on to the button so that you can see the fabric that they were attached to, which is fun.  

 

 

 

I also keep a separate jar of buttons I like the best, regardless of color.  These are the ones that catch my eye.  I don't know why, but they are the fun ones, or at least the ones that are the most different.  Some of them are pretty old, I think, and all are interesting in some way.  They also don't always make sense, fashion wise.  There's one in there that is shaped like an eggplant.  I have no idea what kind of thing would have eggplant buttons!

I have buttons which I don't keep with any of the others, but that I haven't taken pictures of yet.  I have some of my Great Grandfather's WWI uniform buttons and one shell button from the around the civil war (which I mentioned the other day.)

I suppose that it seems silly to get excited about something as silly as a button, but these are things that someone touched, used, and they had a history with someone somewhere.  These buttons were saved by someone for some reason, and I like to think about where they've been.

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you about my buttons!  

 

UGH, FEELINGS

OK, I'm about to do something that I don't do very often and I know it's going to make some of you really uncomfortable.  I'm about to feel feelings on this blog.  I know for some of you, that means you're not going to read this entry, which is fine. That's why I'm warning you now, so you don't have to read any further and get my feelings on you.    I hope you'll come back soon!  :)

OK, so now that they're gone...

This isn't an easy thing for me to do.  I spend most of my time pretending that I don't feel a lot of emotions, because I have found that most people have no patience for them.  Plus, I'd rather be the one who people come to when they have issues so I can help them, rather than bothering people with my own things.  I've been told by a good friend that that's not a great way to live.  So here I am. There are parts of this that I'll have to leave intentionally vague, not because I want to be mysterious, but because I don't fully understand everything myself and I don't want to have to come back and revisit this and fix things.  My main reason for writing this is for a bit of catharsis, rather than wanting pity or anything like that.

For the past month and change, I have felt afraid.  I don't really know what of, exactly, but I feel like I'm waiting for something significant, and possibly bad, to happen.  I usually equate this feeling with finding out about some big, important change somewhere.  You know what I mean, right? It's like when you find out you are losing your job, or someone has died, or something bad just happened and there is nothing at all you can do about it. It's a scary, being-pulled-by-a-riptide feeling and nothing you can do will change anything.  I realize how that sounds and, trust me, I know I sound like a crazy person.  I've tried putting it off to not feeling well, or my spine issues pinching nerves that mimic an anxiety attack and stuff, and maybe this is some mix of that affecting me.  I'd be glad if that was the case.  As for anything actually happening, nothing at all is going on with me, and I've checked with the people I'm close to and nothing big is going on with any of them. So unless they were lying, I'm not picking up on any cues (vibes, whatever) from them about anything that should make me feel like the world is falling in on itself.

I also feel completely powerless.  Some stuff happened last month.  It wasn't anything bad, but I got dragged into it unwillingly and I felt like I didn't have a choice in the matter at all. Then I was criticized for not living up to expectations.  Other things have recently happened that make me feel like I have very little say in things these days, and that I'm given no warnings or explanations when stuff changes that affect me.  I'm afraid I'm going to go blundering into some situation not understanding the new rules and I'll end up making a fool of myself or doing something wrong, and instead of being told how not to do that people will just watch me do it and be embarrassed, or worse, they'll pity me.

I feel afraid, powerless, alone and stuck.  I don't really understand any of it, and that makes me feel even more unhappy, because I usually tend to know myself really well.  I also know I'm not the only person who ever feels this way, but it's new to me.

Don't get me wrong, things are for the most part OK. I am functioning like a normal person.  I'm not hiding under a bed and not talking to people. I'm dealing.  But underneath the normal is this stuff and I don't know what to do to fix it.  I hope whatever is going on will correct itself soon, because feeling like I'm waiting for a piano to fall on my head is exhausting.

So there are my feelings.  I have them.  They are gross.  I'm sorry.

THE EYES HAVE IT!

You want to see something weird?  Of course you do, what am I asking?  But first, some background.

Last week I had to go for my annual eye exam.  Thankfully, the last few times I've been to see the optometrist, my eyes haven't gotten worse and my prescription has stayed pretty consistent.  Since there wasn't any hullaballoo about getting new glasses this year, I decided to ask about possibly getting some colored contacts in addition to my regular ones.  If you've ever seen me up close, you know my eyes are a dark, chocolate brown.  Actually, it's kind of weird, because my dad had light blue eyes and my mom has greenish, hazel eyes. My brother and sister both have blue eyes. I am the family abberation (in more ways than one, probably. ) So let's give it up for whatever recessive trait I inherited!

I've been told I have nice eyes, and I'm glad some people think so, but still...I've had brown ones all my life.  I wanted a little change and this was the least permanent thing I could think of.  The contacts lady at the eye doc was super helpful and she ordered me 4 boxes of non-prescription colored contacts to try out to see which color I would want.  While I was hoping for a big change, the colored contacts didn't make a huge difference because my eyes are so dark.  You could see a bit of difference, but on the whole, it was subtle.  I tried to take a picture of my eyes to see which one I liked the best, but the pictures were a bit blurry.  Apparently my iPhone doesn't like close ups.  Sorry about the quality, but here is what I got:

Here are the blue ones.  They are only blue around the edges and they aren't that noticeable.

Ignore the black circles under my eye, friend. I haven't been sleeping well.

These are the green ones.  I really like them because they make my eyes look like my mom's.  :) 

Still not that different, but different enough.

These are the gray ones.  I actually have two of them in one eye so that the color would show up better, so this is not what my eyes would look like if I wore the gray contacts, but I thought it was neat looking anyway.

I'm staring into your soul right now.

None of these are the weird thing I wanted you to see, though.  Since I was having so much trouble getting a picture of my eye in focus, I got out my macro lens and asked Steve to take a picture of my eye.  He obliged and this was the result:

Borg? Cylon? From Westworld? You pick.

You may have to embiggen the picture to see what is so weird about it, but the macro lens picked up the dot matrix coloring of the contact and you can even see the word "demo" that is stamped onto it.  It looks like I have cyborg eyes!  It freaked me out a little.  I'd never seen what a colored contact on an eyeball looked like up close. Now we both have!  Haha!  

Look into my eyes!  RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!

Sorry about all the eye closeups, if eyes freak you out.  Just know that these eyes have a lot of love, laughter and compassion in them.  Well, usually.  In light of full disclosure I've been told there is a bit of devilry in them, too.  :)

DANG NATURE, YOU SCARY

This isn't a real entry.

Well, it is, but not a normal one.  I just came across this video on YouTube and developed a brand new phobia!  Please join me!



All together now:  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWTFAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING: THE BLOG OF DOOM

1) I finally recovered from my birthday, thank you very much.  I was so full that day, y'all.  I really was. I still went out and bought myself some ice cream cupcakes, because I wanted something to blow a candle out on top of (I've got my priorities.)  But by the time I got home all I wanted to do was sit and not move very much.  Steve, bless him, still wanted to take me somewhere to get dinner.  I'd told him several days earlier that I didn't want to try and eat at a restaurant because it was Valentine's day and trying to do that is a nightmare, so I told him take out would be fine.  At the time I thought it would be, but I was so not hungry.  He was really insistent on doing something, so we headed out to go to a grocery store for sandwiches, figuring that it wouldn't be so crowded.  Wow, were we wrong.

OK, so here is something I don't understand.  Why are there people - grown up, seemingly otherwise capable people - going out on actual Valentine's day and buying gifts at 5:00 PM?  Shouldn't that be something thought about in advance?  Granted, I suppose that if you want to buy flowers or something, maybe you don't want to do that the day before, but still...  Eh, anyway, the grocery store was so full of people that we couldn't get any service, so we left and hit a drive through.  I was OK with that because I knew I wouldn't be able to eat much.

I feel kind of bad.  I don't think I was a very good Valentine's or Birthday date.  I hadn't been feeling well for a week or more, and it was making me edgy and unhappy, so I'm sure dealing with that was no fun for Steve.  I tried to explain, but it's hard to explain not feeling well when there isn't a specific, hey, this hurts, kind of problem.  He's patient, though.  Got to give him that. I think he's just biding his time and collecting enough evidence to have be committed.  :)  Anyway, the day ended OK and I barely ate anything for two days after.

2) Dear Lord.  I'm 39 years old now.  I've got a lot of shenanigans to take care of this year.  I'm going to need your help.  :)

3) Y'all, I thought I was going crazy.  Seriously, like, genuinely crazy for the past couple of weeks.  I was on edge like you wouldn't believe and I was having what felt like the world's longest anxiety attack.  It was awful.  I think I've figured out what was causing it, though, or at least I hope I have.  You remember last year I told you about having all of those spine problems?  That was about a year ago, wasn't it?  Dang.

Anyway, when I was going to physical therapy, the therapist told me I'd need to be careful when I went to the gym, so I didn't cause myself any damage.  I managed to start going to the gym again (off and on. Shut up.) and I wasn't particularly careful.  I can't be 100% positive, but I think I pinched some nerves in my neck and back using the elliptical machine.  One of the main feelings I get when I have an anxiety attack is it feels like my neck is clenching up.  Kind of like how you feel when you know someone is watching you. It never occurred to me that I'd hurt myself, but I'm pretty sure I did. I had to stop sleeping with a pillow and basically start sleeping on ice packs, but the feeling is finally starting to fade. I don't think it's completely fixed, but at least I don't feel like the skin across my back is trying to creep off anymore.

Of course, I could be wrong and am really having a perpetual anxiety attack.  If that's the case, when I'm whacked out on psych meds and hiding under a bed all the time, we can all come back and giggle at this blog entry.  I give you permission.

You know what sucks about hurting myself at the gym (if that's what I did?)  I literally don't know how to exercise anymore.  I can't run, I can't...ellipticalize, riding a regular stationary bike puts my neck in a bad position, and I can't lift weights anymore.  I was going back to try and lose a bit of the weight I've put back on, and now I have no idea what to do.  The only thing that has seemed to help lately is just not eating, but if I want to, you know, stay alive, I can't do that very often.  What am I going to do?  I don't want to keep gaining weight!

I don't know how to work my body anymore!  It's quite frustrating.

4) Steve and I had a fun day on Saturday.  He's been listening to the Dirk Gently audio novels while driving to and from work, and he wanted me to hear them too, but we don't carpool anymore and are only in the car together for a little bit at a time every few days.  We decided to take a road trip to Guntersville, mainly just to be in the car to listen to the book, but we figured that we might as well enjoy the destination as well as the journey.

Once we got there, we walked around a bit. We went to some antique stores and I found some more buttons!  When I told the man who worked at the store that I collected old buttons, he gave me a tiny, civil war era button made from a shell for free.  I thought that was very nice.  We drove to a place that sells catalog returns and overstock.  It was mostly furniture and house goods, but I FINALLY got a sink to replace the janky one in the front bathroom for when we get a replacement vanity cabinet.  We drove to Albertville and found the silver fire hydrant, which is the millionth one produced in Albertville and was chrome plated and on display.  I like the whole "Roadside America" thing!  Now I want to see more weird Americana!

We basically drove around all day and listened to the book.  Most people drive around to talk, but it's nice to not talk sometimes, too!  The Dark Tea Time of the Soul is a little confusing, but still a good book. :)

HELP...MEEEEEEEEEE...

Today is Valentine's Day and my birthday.

People keep feeding me.  Dear God, they will not stop feeding me.

It started with doughnuts. My boss got me doughnuts and that was good. I like doughnuts.

Then more people came.  MORE PEOPLE CAME AND THE FOOD DIDN'T STOP!

There was a ladies prayer meeting and they brought us food, but some was for my birthday.  They sang happy birthday to me and handed me a plate of food.

Baptist women do not screw around when it comes to food.

I don't want to be rude and not at least taste what they've given me, so I've been eating all day and I don't know if I'm going to survive. I had to secretly throw away part of a cupcake. I did it like I was smuggling contraband out of the country, just so no one would see me and get their feelings hurt. I've hidden a baggy of mini muffins so no one knows I didn't eat them. My boss then bought us lunch because that's what he does and I told him he didn't have to, but he still did.

I love that all of these people want to do things for me, but I'm so full that I can't move.

I've eaten all of the food in the world. I've probably eaten the food that should have gone to a village in Malawi.  Please tell them I'm sorry.

My pancreas has given up. I'm going towards the light...

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Did you know that they are now in the process of tearing down Madison Square Mall?  Well, if you live around here, you probably know, but everyone else probably doesn't care! Haha!

I haven't gone there in a long time, mainly because the shops inside had started to close one by one and it was like going into a haunted house. Even so, knowing that it is going to be gone makes me sad because I spent SO MUCH of my formative years in that mall!  I was only six years old, but I remember what a big deal it was when it opened.  I remember the first time I went there with my mom, and I was so small and it seemed so huge and overwhelming.  It was one of the first places where I was allowed to run around unsupervised with my friends, and one of the first places I went when I got my drivers license.  I went on dates there (shut up, they were fun), my friends and I would go and spend hours walking around and I even worked in one of the stores there for a very short time.

I know change is inevitable, and whoever bought the property plans to make it a place better suited to the kind of town that Huntsville is growing into, but it isn't fun to see a place that has so many memories attached to it going away.  Hopefully I'll get to make some new memories in whatever kind of place that it is going to be next, but I can't help but think that whatever comes next will never live up to the silliness and fun I had there when I was a kid!

2) Last Saturday Steve and I were supposed to be going to a lock picking class that would be run by one of the people who is associated with one of Steve's many extracurricular cyber security groups.  This would normally be one of those things that Steve would do on his own, but I asked to go along because I thought that would be fun, plus lock picking might be a good skill to have during the zombie apocalypse.  I don't know if most people will lock their houses before they are brutally slain by the undead, but they may have closets or pantries where they keep supplies that need to be unlocked.  You never know!

Unfortunately, for me at least, what we arrived at wasn't a lock picking class.  I had apparently been signed up (unknowingly) for a Cyber Security Conference, and I can say with certainty that I was WAY out of my element.  We walked inside the main conference room, and BAM! I'm surrounded by neckbeards.  Not only was this a conference, the lock picking thing wasn't even a class, it was just some dude set up in a room with a bunch of locks, and he'd let you borrow tools to see if you could unlock them.  I did manage to learn to pick a couple of padlocks and handcuff locks, but then I had to sit through panels that made no sense to me.  I could have left, because Steve had a friend there that would have taken him home if I took the car, but Steve wouldn't let me.  I'm sure he had his reasons, but I don't know what they were!  Luckily, we didn't stay terribly late, because I think I might have bitten someone in an attempt to get thrown out! 

I wish that I could get more interested in cyber security, though.  The industry is hiring like crazy and there are seemingly not many women in it at all.  I think I saw six women at the conference besides myself, and three of them were serving coffee and doughnuts.  It's just all way above my head.  I did manage to smile and nod a lot during the panels, so maybe no one knew I was confused.

We did get a set of lock picking tools out of the deal though, and I'm getting better at picking the practice lock we have!  Silver lining!

3) Have you noticed how down and negative everyone has been lately?  I know things aren't great, but I also know they aren't so bad that almost everything should be mired in doom and gloom.  At least, it isn't just yet.  Almost everything in my Facebook feed is political, my favorite website has stopped being entertaining because every article they publish is just an ugly screed against the president (and God knows I'd like to hear something different these days) and even my Twitter feed has gotten ridiculous, and I don't even follow anyone in politics. Even the twitter account that shows cute puppies has gotten political.  Ugh.  It's life draining. Going online has gotten depressing.  I'm holding on tight to everything that I do that doesn't get political these days.  I don't mind discussing that sort of thing with rational people, but geez, trying to find a rational person is getting harder to do.  I hope that I can be a person that people can talk to if they get tired of all of this stuff. 

Sometimes I feel completely smothered by the things that are going on because I don't always feel I have a choice about them.

But I know it could be a lot worse. 

THIS JOB

I've complained about my job a bit in the past.  I don't like to do it much, because I know that I've got kind of a sweet gig here. The hours are decent, what I do is not hard, and most people here seem to think I'm really good at my job and they bring me snacks.  I'm grateful for that, absolutely.  As long as I am safely inside the building, I'm usually good.  Working here has been an interesting experience, and I say that with true sincerity.

But sometimes this place is really freaking weird.

Don't get me wrong, our church is a great place.  We have a loving and close congregation, and it's one of the few southern baptist churches left in our town that have held off on flashy stage lights, worship bands and tattooed preachers.  We are an old school place, with old school members, and with few exceptions that's not such a bad thing. Lately, however, we seem to have wondered into a bubble of complete bat-poop crazy that seems to be holding fairly steady.

*In the past week and a half, as I already told you, we had a guy who was working for us get held up at gunpoint. Our preacher, who decided to pretend to be Barney Fife, started casing the neighborhood for the man, and actually found him and managed to get him arrested.  The man is now being held not only for armed robbery, but also possession and he had a warrant out for him because of domestic violence.  We are glad the guy is in jail, but I'm also very glad the preacher didn't get capped.  This neighborhood isn't good for snitches.

 *A few days later, we had a drunk man stumble up the aisle of the sanctuary (saying all he wanted to do was pray) but he also wanted someone to buy him a pizza. 

*We had one of our special members, a man with a form of autism, have a complete come apart when the worker from his group home asked him to sit with the other men he came to church with. It disrupted things.

*We had a lady trip over the lip of the doorway and lay in the floor, flat on her back, until I called 911 (again) even though she wasn't hurt and refused treatment when the paramedics got here.  Her sister, a fruit-bat of the first order who believes that she is some kind of long-lost mother goddess who will eventually go to Africa to save children (?) and believes that the African people will see her as royalty, told us she was in the medical field (she is not) and so she would take care of everything (she did not.)  By the way, the sister also told us that she could cure AIDS and cancer with common household ingredients, but she can't tell anyone how to do it or the government will have her killed. I'm not kidding about any of that, just so you know.

*The same man who showed up drunk and wanted a pizza came back here today while the preacher was gone, so I had to talk to him. He didn't remember that he'd just been here asking for stuff, and even though I told him we had nothing to give him, as we are having to reevaluate how we handle things after the armed robbery, he wouldn't leave.  I had to tell him about six times that we couldn't help him.  He also had a tall tale of woe, which I suppose was supposed to make me throw money at him. No idea.

*I was inadvertently pulled in, at least tangentially, to a situation where a man from our church (allegedly) defrauded and was attempting to take over the life/money of a mentally challenged woman. I have had to talk to an investigator for the Huntsville SVU, and will have to give over copies of my notary records, because I notarized the form that would allow him to do this.  I know I can't get in trouble for what I did, but the fact that that skeezy dude got me involved makes me mad.

*And finally, today, one of our more...out there, for want to better term, members came by the church three times.  She didn't say what she was doing, but that's OK, because we know her and she comes by occasionally to pray.  She'd come in, walk into the church, walk back out.  On her second visit, she came into the office and asked if I wanted an apple.  I said yes to be nice, and she left the plastic produce bag with me so I could choose one while she disappeared into the depths of the church again.  When she came back, she told me to keep all of them.  Uh...sure.  She came back one more time, walked back into the church without saying hello and left without saying goodbye.  Huh...OK then!  I didn't think about her again for a while, except to tell people about the weird apple thing, until I walked into the sanctuary to load the pastor's Wednesday night Power Point Presentation.  That's when I noticed that she'd left apples on the altar.  I don't think I need tell you that, as Southern Baptists, we don't generally leave offerings of a tangible nature on the altar, but for some reason this lady had been compelled to leave produce there for Jesus.  I suppose that's who it was for, at least.  She didn't leave a note or anything.  So that's when I realized that she had given me some of the apples she'd brought for Jesus.  She gave me sacrifice apples.  I don't even know where to begin on that one.

These are all real things that have happened in the last 10 days, and it doesn't even scratch the surface of the crazy that goes on here on a regular basis.  I may need to look for other work.

Everyday is an adventure.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Wow, happy new year about half a month late!  I hope you all had lovely Christmases, or whatever it is you celebrate!

Ours was lovely and very low key, thanks for asking.  Steve's dad was in New England with his brother this year, so Steve and I really only celebrated things with my family on Christmas day.  It was nice, though.  I certainly don't mind quiet holidays.  At home I made elaborate Christmas cookies and we watched Netflix junk, and I think we ate pizza rolls for dinner.  Good times, noodle salad.

2) Not a lot of any interest has been going on lately, to be honest.  Time keeps on slippin' (slippin', slippin') into the future, as it tends to do. I had so much I was going to do in January, but it's like I fell asleep on January 1st and woke up and half the month was already gone, so I'm playing catch up as best I can.  Time is weird that way when we get older, isn't it?

At work, I've got all the lovely beginning of the year mess to deal with.  W2 and 1099 forms are due and I haven't even started them, which means people are going to be breathing down my face soon if I don't get started on that!  We have new budget sheets and new pay spreadsheets, and it's really only sucking the life out of me a little bit every time I think of all of that.  I've also been sick for about a week, which is never fun.

3) WHEN SUDDENLY...

Hehe, just about the time I hit save after writing #2, the door to the church opened and a workman who'd been installing cables for us walked back inside the office.  He said there had been a man outside that had a gun and had asked him for his wallet.  I didn't really understand the problem at first, because the guy was kind of calm, so I said, "Do you want me to call the police?"  He said yes.  Of course he said yes.  I'm a doofus.

- OK, before you roll your eyes, I knew I should call the police, but I wasn't sure if I needed to call 911, or if I needed to call the other, non-emergency number.  The guy was obviously OK and the man had run away, so I wasn't sure if 911 was the proper people to call. I also didn't realize that the workman had actually been robbed, because he didn't say that.  I thought the guy had pulled a gun on him and then got spooked away.  Clearly, my brain was working slower than it needed to at that moment.-

So I called 911 for the first time in my life.  That's another one of those F*CK THAT list items you never want to have to do.  I didn't really know what to tell the operator, so I handed off the phone and went to tell the pastor what had happened. We also had to tell the women's prayer group that was meeting downstairs, what had happened and that they couldn't leave just yet.  One poor woman had left early, and she was the one walking out the door when the robber was just leaving, so that scared her badly and even though she saw the guy, she wasn't here when the cops arrived.

I was surprised how fast everything happened after that.  We soon had a bunch of cops and a K9 unit here.  They set up a perimeter in the neighborhood and went looking for the guy.  I was very impressed with the man who actually was robbed.  He was very calm, a good observer, was able to tell the cops what he looked like, and the exact model of gun he had used. Apparently the guy is a gun enthusiast and knew specifically what the guy had.  He was also able to keep his head when the guy held him up.  The workman was on a ladder when the guy (who had walked by twice before and asked for change and was told no) came back up with the gun. The workman, who's name was TJ so I'll just call him that, took out his wallet and only handed him the cash inside instead of handing over his whole wallet. 

I'm not sure how long all of this took. I stayed outside with the pastor and TJ until things settled down. We asked all the ladies to leave while the police were still here, and believe it or not, TJ went back and finished up our install!  I think what happened finally settled into TJ's head after it was over, because he seemed to be more nervous afterwards.  Poor guy. The police haven't caught the robber, as far as we know.  Of course, now we're all super vigilant about the people we see and who we let inside the building.  There had been an active shooter situation in this neighborhood on Monday, but our office had been closed for MLK day.  Things seem to be getting worse around here and I'm not feeling as safe as I wish I did.

So that was our excitement!  May the rest of the year be just as exciting, but maybe in good ways instead of bad ones.

Yeah, I think I'm going to start seriously looking for another job.

4) Steve is officially a deacon now!  They did the voting last week and all three men considered were voted in.  It's all very weird to me.  I mean, I'm proud of him for taking on the role and all that, but I certainly don't feel like someone who should be married to a deacon.  People keep telling me that now I have to behave myself.  Maybe they're kidding, but I don't know for sure. I didn't sign up for this, Steve did.  Personally, I think I'll just keep on being whoever and whatever the hell I want, but that's just me. So now I feel like I should go out and do something rebellious and not-at-all deacon's-wifely!  We'll see how it goes from there. :)