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. :)

AN ADDENDUM

OK, so I let my nerd rage get away from me yesterday.  Feel my shame.

I SAID FEEL IT!

I realized this morning that I had not, as previously stated, seen the original, hand written, lyrics to "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" by Robert May which proved Gene Autry changed the name Donder to Donner in the song.

So I did some digging.

What I had actually seen was the original, hand written draft of the poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas," or as most of us know it, "Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clarke Moore (or whoever. Apparently there is a controversy over who actually wrote it, but that's not important right now.)

Whoever wrote it was the person to give the reindeer we all know and love the names we use in popular culture (Rudolph not included, obvs.)  I looked back at the draft, and sure enough, the name was Donder, like I thought.  HOWEVER, when the song "Rudolph" was written, Robert May used an alternate spelling of Donder, which happens to be Donner, and ergo, it isn't a mistake.

Also, there are two other alternate spellings for both Donder and Blitzen: Dunder and Blixem, which are Dutch words for thunder and lightening respectively.

I did not know this!  Dogs and cats, living together, MASS HYSTERIA.

So, basically, I was wrong and have been humbled and Christmas is ruined.

via GIPHY

; )

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) A couple of weeks ago I was scheduled to sing during the Sunday morning church service.  I was not feeling well  for whatever reason, but it wasn't too bad.  A little tired, a little queasy, a bit dizzy...you know, the regular crud that goes around and around this time of year.  I was nervous about singing, of course, which didn't help matters, but I was OK.  No big deal.

At least it wasn't a big deal until I got up on stage and the music started.  I don't know if my nerves kicked everything else into overdrive or what, because suddenly I was standing in front of our entire (albeit small) congregation waiting for my cue to start singing and had become about 93% certain that I was either going to pass out or vomit.  That's a pretty bad feeling. I don't know about you, but I don't want to do either one of those things in front of a room full of people.  So not only was I nervous about singing (and I'd forgotten the sheet of music that had my lyrics on it, so I was freaking out about forgetting the words to the song) I also had a second layer of freaking out because I was fairly certain that I was about to have something unpleasant happen up on stage.  I started singing and everything sounded ok, but I had to hold on to the pulpit to keep from falling down.  I thought I was being nonchalant about it, but apparently other people noticed something was wrong, but at least if I did go down, there would have been people at the ready to help me out! Yay!

In the end, I didn't actually barf or faint and I made it through my song, but that's the closest I've ever been to having a medical emergency while singing before. I felt better after I got to sit down for a while, so I have no idea what the problem was. I'm glad, because I have a feeling I'd never fully be comfortable ever singing in public again had I thrown up on stage.  That would be a shame.

Huh. Now that I've written it all out, I realize how anticlimactic it all is, but still...I wanted to share.

2) Did you know that you can now visit my blog over an encrypted connection?  Instead of http:taebelle.blogspot.com, you can use https:taebelle.blogspot.com. It's the little s that makes the difference.  Just FYI.

3) Have I ever told you about the time I won the 4H cookie baking contest 3 years in a row?  Well, technically I only won 2 years in a row, but I know the third year they just didn't give me the 1st place ribbon because they didn't think it would be fair to the other participants if I won all 3 years.  The reason I know this is because all of the judges asked for my recipe that third year, and they didn't ask for anyone elses. Pfft.

I have no idea what made me think of any of that, because I honestly hadn't thought of even being in 4H in a long time. There was a time when I could bake, and win prizes for my baking, without any problem and that's when I was a kid. What happened?  I know my current oven is not 100% reliable, temperature wise, but still...I was 10 and not burning things so often.  At what point did I lose my ability to cook?  Probably when I opted to do Agribusiness instead of Home Ec.  Eh, I ain't bovvered.  I learned how to weld and use power tools in Agribusiness, so really I think I came out ahead in the end.

4) I can't believe it's almost Christmas. I know how cliche that is, but it's the truth. In some ways I feel like the month has flown by, and in others, I feel like it's dragging.  It's like riding on some weird kind of temporal elevator that is having electrical hiccups. I've still got a lot to do, but I can't seem to accomplish anything useful.  I just look at what needs to be done and then sit down in abject horror at the scope of it all and ignore it.

Steve has had a lot of Christmas parties to go to this year, because he's involved in so many things now.  You'll either be thrilled (but probably disappointed) to hear that I managed not to do anything awful at his corporate Christmas party this year!  I stayed very still, I didn't eat anything that required a plate, and I didn't drink anything containing alcohol.  OK, so I accidentally almost broke one guy's arm by hitting him with a door, but it was his own fault for not knowing I was coming out of a door when I did, and Steve and I left right after I hit him, so maybe he didn't even know who I was!  We went to a party for one of his Cyber Security groups, and that went well because we got to sit at a table. I'm much better at parties when I don't have to circulate, so I got to talk to one of Steve's co-workers for a while.  He was from Ohio, and was very excited that I had once been in FFA. It came up, shut up. He said I was the first person he'd met down here that had been in that (Wha?) and that was a big deal where he is from, so we talked about it. A lot.  Apparently he hasn't been over to Limestone county at any point, or he'd find a lot more people to discuss FFA with, but whatever!  I tagged out of his last cyber security party and Steve got someone else to go with him and I was glad.  I can only pretend to be fascinated with cyber security for so long. Yikes.

Other than that, December is weirdly lonely because everyone is really busy doing...stuff. Everyone disappears. So even if you're at a million parties or whatever, you can't just sit down and have regular conversations with your people. I'll be glad when things settle down and get back to normal. I kind of miss what was going on before all the Christmas craziness started.

5) I'm going to tell you a very specific, Christmas related irritation that I have.  It's the very famous Gene Autry version of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer."  He mispronounces the name of one of the reindeer.  He says "Donner" and it is supposed to be "Donder."  I even looked at the original, handwritten lyrics written by Robert May and it is Donder! Gene Autry sang the definitive version of the song and he messed it up! NERD RAGE!

6) I know that it probably sounds like I don't like Christmas much, but I promise that isn't the case. I just think it's harder to enjoy it when you're an adult.  Too much to do and not enough time to enjoy it, maybe?  But at least I know that people I love will be close by (Even if some of them will be there for just a little while), there will be sausage balls and the Doctor Who Christmas special, and at some point, there will be a whole day where I'm not obligated to wear pants!  Who can have a problem with that? :)  Merry Christmas everyone!

R.I.P. COMPUTER

My desktop computer died a few weeks ago without warning.  When I say it died, I mean it was, in the immortal words of Jerry Clower, grave-yard dead.  That might not sound like a very big deal to some of you, but it was.  That computer held the entirety of my professional design portfolio, all of my design software, files, fonts, and patterns, all of the pictures that I'd taken and stored for the past 15 years (along with scans of other pictures that were taken before things were digital) my library of audio books, my digital crochet patterns, my writing  projects, my spreadsheets dating back to 2004, and the very, very worst thing to me was that it held the archives of all of the emails that I'd been saving since practically forever.  I don't just mean regular emails, I mean important and special emails that I'd saved on purpose.  These were irreplaceable emails from my late father, my late mother-in-law, and emails that people had sent me during bad times in my life where they were encouraging me (I'd pull those out and read them periodically when I needed a boost.) There were emails where Steve and I were writing our wedding vows, emails where I'd been sent photos and recipes, and then there were just emails from people I love a whole lot and liked to keep our correspondence, because we are funny and had fun conversations.  I kind of likened it to those letters you hear about people finding in old hope chests, tied with blue satin ribbons and kept forever, only they were digital and had no ribbon, because technology hasn't evolved that far yet..  That's just how important they were to me. 

I have no idea what happened to the computer, but when it died, it went down hard and took everything with it.  When I realized what happened, I thought I'd go into a major panic, but I didn't. I sat down and cried for about 3 minutes, but it was just too big to cry over, really.  I hadn't really had time to think through what all the loss of the computer was going to entail, so I went back to my bedroom and slept for an hour, the way a person does when they are trying to avoid bad things.  Besides...I had backups.  Steve said I had backups.  Steve should know, because he is a computer guy.  BACKUPS.

Only, for reasons we still don't understand, both backups failed.  FAILED.  We knew that one of them hadn't been working properly, but the second one, a 2T external hard drive that was supposed to be my saving grace in situations like this, also bit the big one.  I still didn't panic, although, I came really close when Steve said that my second backup wasn't working.  I must've looked kind of scary, because the first thing he did was bundle me into the car and take me to the Apple store to buy a new computer.  The salesman took one look at my face and didn't try to up sale or anything else, he just let us buy the new computer and leave.  Steve spent a LONG time trying to figure out what had happened to the computer.  He felt bad, apparently, because he had not been checking to make sure that any of my backups were still functioning...for years. I can't blame him, I guess.  It wasn't his computer, so why would he think of it, but WHAT IS THE POINT OF BEING MARRIED TO A MAN WHO DOES I.T. WORK IF HE DOESN'T CHECK ALL THE COMPUTERS?!!  *ahem*  Sorry.

To make a long story much shorter, we took the old computer to a Mac shop that does data restore and they managed to find some of my files.  Some of them were useful, some of them were garbage, and some of them were things I'd deleted a long time ago (so just a reminder, kids...nothing is ever truly gone on a hard drive unless it's really, really important to you.)   Steve ran a recover program on the external hard drive, and we found some more files...again, not my emails, but still...my design portfolio isn't a complete loss anymore.  So there is a very thin silver lining to this story.  I now have an updated iMac with a few usable files on it, and now I have a subscription to the Adobe software I need that will save things on a cloud in case of another complete meltdown.

In light of full disclosure, though, I feel I should be honest enough to tell you that I finally did have the long awaited, stress-related come apart brought on by the loss of my computer files. I'm not proud of myself, but I can't, with good conscience, leave you with the impression that I handled this with complete composure. 

The recover program that Steve used on the external hard drive took over a week to run.  For some reason, the files that were stored on the thing had fragmented, and the program had to piece them back together like a jigsaw puzzle from hell.  We weren't even sure that when it was done, any of the files would be usable, so when we got back from our Thanksgiving visit to Georgia, we saw that it had finished.  However, as it turned out, we couldn't look at the files right away because the recovery program needed to be paid for.  Fine...thought it was free...but whatever.  We paid the fee and were sent a key to open the program, only the key wouldn't work.  Steve decided to call the help desk, because at this point, if we lost all these files again, I might have burned down the house.  Look, y'all...I don't know who's big, amazing idea is has been to locate help desk jobs in India, but I'm going to just go ahead and say that the people over there - as qualified and as smart and capable as they are - do not seem to understand when people from America are trying to tell them no.  I don't know if the tone doesn't translate well, or if there is a language barrier, but when Steve tried to explain our trouble, the man on the other end of the phone decided that instead of helping us, he needed to remotely log into my machine and try to find firewall issues.  Nothing that Steve, in his soft-spoken, computer guy language, seemed to say would deter this man from doing just that.  Thinking that would speed up the process, Steve allowed him to remote in, only the help desk man didn't seem to understand that a firewall wasn't what we needed at the moment. He insisted that he needed to finish that before he could tell us how to use the key to open the computer program.

This is when I lost my composure.

I took the phone from Steve's hand and proceeded to explain to the man, in tones and language I normally never use with other human beings, that neither I, nor my computer, needed whatever (expletive deleted) that he thought he needed to do right now unless it involved unlocking the (expletive deleted) program that we'd just bought from them. I shouted at the poor man, I rhapsodized about what he was currently not doing to satisfy me as a customer, and then I went on to elaborate about how I'd gladly speak to whomever they felt it appropriate to elevate me to in the event that the person I was currently talking to couldn't help me in the way I needed to be helped.  I said a lot of things.  A lot of mean things.  The man on the other end of the phone was very quiet, and when I handed the phone back to Steve, the help desk man went on to help us unlock this program.

Then I went into my bedroom and cried very hard for a long time, because I am not the kind of person that does things like that.  If I could have called India again and gotten the same man, I'd have apologized to him.  Having worked as customer service for as long as I did, I do not, as a rule, do things like that.  I can only blame the stress of the computer stuff finally just wearing me down.  I need to do some kind of penance, but just what, I'm not sure.

So that is the story about how I lost, and now partially recovered, my computer stuff.  My emails are still gone, and I keep finding lots of little things that didn't get recovered, but at least my freelance work isn't a complete loss, so...yay.

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Heh...this job. 

I want to start off my admitting something. I hope this isn't the last job I will ever do. I know I'm good at it and I love being able to help my church, and I love the people I work for, but I do hope I'll be able to work in a more lucrative and creative field again someday.  I don't mean to come across as ungrateful for my job, but it isn't exactly the kind of thing that stirs the imagination, if you get what I mean.  

On paper, the whole thing seems pretty straight forward. I'm called a secretary, but in reality I suppose I'm more of an office manager for our church.  I answer phones, keep up with files and things  like that, but I also do accounting and insurance stuff, as well as keeping up with payroll and taxes.  Exciting stuff.  :)

However, I do have to admit, that aside from the things that I will be able to put on my resume, I have also gotten some really interesting experiences.  This morning for instance.  My pastor has been having some trouble with his vision and his eye doctor wanted him to try wearing contact lenses for a while instead of glasses.  Like a lot of people starting out with contacts, he has a lot of trouble putting them in himself, so he asked me if I would help him. He knows I wear contacts, so I thought he was wanting some advice on how to put them in.  No, he needed more help than that.  I spent about twenty minutes this morning putting his contacts in his eyes for him!  I was surprisingly not grossed out about doing it, which surprised me. I think maybe he has the hang of it now, though, so I don't think I'll have to do that again! Fingers crossed!

2) Last night Steve's company gave the employees tickets to the Galaxy of Lights at the Huntsville Botanical Gardens.  That is where they do an elaborate light display along the path and you can walk along and listen to music and look at the lights.  We haven't actually done the walk through in years, so I was excited to go!  Plus, we found out that we were going to be there on one of the Dog Walking nights, so the gardens were full of people walking their dogs!  Steve had to give me a pop quiz before we got there so that I could try and remember the names of the people he worked with (which almost backfired in a spectacular way, but luckily I didn't have to say his company's owner's name out loud.  Let's just say that had I said his name the way I thought it was pronounced, I would have called him something that wouldn't have been flattering.) 

We had such a good time!  I met a lot of people and I got to pet a lot of random dogs!  I also accidentally stepped onto a dog turd, which was less than ideal, but when you've got a lot of dogs, you'll have the occasional turd.  Such is life. 

3) Um...anyone else kind of feel like there might be some slight overreaction about the election turn out going on?  Just a little?  Like...oh, I dunno, maybe some of these people need to calm down and deal with shit like adults?

(By the way, just me saying that much apparently makes me racist, homophobic, a misogynist, and possibly pro-hate crime, or some such thing.  I thought maybe you should know what a horrible person I was, just in case it means you can't be friends with me anymore.  Sorry.  It's been a good run, though, hasn't it? I'll miss you. I'm sorry that my past as not any of those things at all has just been proven false and I turned out to be such a disappointment.)

*rude hand gesture*

HUH...

I know that I don't have any right to say anything about the election.  I didn't vote.  I couldn't.  I know that sounds stupid, if not downright reprehensible, to a lot of people, but I couldn't, with good conscience, support either candidate.  My gut didn't trust Hillary Clinton, and my brain didn't trust Donald Trump. 

I struggled with it. I didn't want to be one of those people who just couldn't make a decision, but I couldn't see how either one would be good. I felt guilty about not going, but I didn't want to just go and vote for the sake of getting a sticker so I could post a selfie, either.  I also wasn't going to let anyone shame me into making an empty gesture, because screw that noise.  The world is full of empty gestures, you know?  If I'm going to get behind something, I want to believe in it with some conviction and not just because it's the "thing to do."

Last night I was alone, bored, and not feeling particularly well. I think if I'd had someone to watch the election results with, I might have done so, but instead I went to bed early.  I kept up with some of the results online until I got sleepy.

When I woke up this morning, I was truly unprepared to find out that Donald Trump had won this election.
I genuinely thought Hillary Clinton was going to win.  I really did.  Whether or not I trusted her, she at least had some experience.  I can't say I'm sorry she lost, but I can say I'm confused that she lost.

So for better or for for worse this living muppet, Donald Trump, is our new president.  I honestly hope it isn't the disaster that it very well could turn into.  All of this really blows my mind.

So...yeah.  God bless America.

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: HOLY CITY EDITION

SEPTEMBER 24, 2016

I wish there could be some kind of swashbuckling adventure story about how we got out of Charleston by the skin of our teeth, but alas, it is not to be.

No, we just got up super early, had breakfast in the Starbucks in the lobby of our hotel (because the call of pumpkin spice is strong, that's why) and we went back to the little airport to turn in our rental car.  Steve doesn't have to go through proper security lines anymore because he has some kind of pre-checked thing (grumblegrumblegrumble) so I got in line with the rest of the peasants and got frisked by the TSA.  This time my right ankle set off the body scan alert.  Seriously, I know I have thick ankles, but they aren't that bad!

There was a lady in line with me who had a really neat tattoo, though.  Around her thigh she had tattoo of a lace garter with an antique pistol stuck through it.  I mean, you don't see that everyday!

So after that, we went to one of the shops so that I could get a snow globe that wouldn't get confiscated, and we waited on our plane to leave.  Since our flight wasn't full, I ended up being able to move to a seat right next to an exit that had a lot of leg room!  I think Steve wanted it, but he was nice enough to let me use it.  Awwww.

We landed in Atlanta (have I mentioned how much I don't enjoy the Atlanta airport?) and our layover was long enough for us to have lunch and sit around for a while.  We ended up on a flight full of kids going to Sci-Vis Space Camp (which is the program for visually impaired children) but we didn't say anything to them.  At this point, I may not be the best ambassador for the place!  Haha!  Nah, I wouldn't have said anything to discourage them.  I'm not a monster, after all!  They were excited.  I ended up sitting next to a lady on the trip home that had an almost visible bubble of "DON"T TALK TO ME" around her.  I was ok with that.

Then we got home and that was that.  I already miss it.  Not the sweating, of course, but there is something about the place.  I can't really explain it. 

I think when I'm old, I'm going to move over to Charleston or Savannah... somewhere out there  Old people don't mind the heat so much.  I just need to find some people to go with me.

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: HOLY CITY EDITION

SEPTEMBER 23, 2016

Today was the day that Steve didn't actually have to work!  Yay!

We got all our stuff together and headed out to our first destination.  We'd looked at a map and found a place called Sullivan's Island.  There wasn't a whole lot of stuff there, but we figured that we'd still take a look around.  It was a nice drive out there, and we finally got to drive out over the big bridge.  I don't particularly like driving over bridges like that.  I know that they are made by smart engineers and everything, but engineers can have bad days.  Eeeeeeesh.  Anyway, we drove through the lovely little town and wound up driving through what looked like a residential area.  We were going to go out to the beach, but we felt a little weird parking along people's houses to get to it, so we drove until we found a tiny little park with what looked to be a public beach.  It was really beautiful and tiny, and it was on the edge of everything, so we got out and walked a bit.  It wasn't a place where you could go swimming or anything.  There were signs that warned of a dangerous riptide, but it was a beautiful place to walk.  The sand was pearl gray and it sparkled!  I picked up some shells and looked around a bit.  We didn't stay for long, since it looked like it might rain, but we stayed long enough to see a wedding party come and take some pictures.  I loved it there.  How nice would it be to live in a place like that?

We left there and drove to the next place which was called Folly Beach.  Folly Beach is much more like the beach towns that I'm used to.  It wasn't as nice as Sullivan's Island, and it wasn't huge by any stretch of the imagination, but there were shops and restaurants, and there were hotels and beach houses all over the place.  We parked the car and walked around a bit.  We walked through the shops first, which I have to say, had some hilarious merchandise.  I love looking at the cheesy stuff that gets sold in tourist shops.  I don't buy it, but I love looking at it!  We got hungry while doing that, and we kind of stumbled across a very out-of-nowhere Irish Pub and we decided to stop and eat there.  It seemed oddly out of place, to be honest, and except for the size of the building, it was very much like the pubs we saw while we were in Dublin.  I thought that was kind of neat.

After lunch, we moved on to the city pier.  We walked up, and a very friendly man stopped us and told us all about the stuff we could see there.  I liked him immediately, and he seemed to love his job, so I mentally adopted him.  : )  Steve decided he didn't want to walk the entire length of the pier, so I left him at the tables, and I walked to the end.  It was really cool!  There were a lot of people fishing, and some guy had just caught the biggest fish I'd ever seen outside of an aquarium.  When he pulled it up, everyone came over to see it.  I don't know what kind it was, but it was so pretty that I kind of hate that he caught it!  It was gold and about four feet long!  I didn't stick around, though, because I wanted to go down to the beach before the rain started for real.

We walked down to the shore, and one thing I noticed was that the sand was half white and half black (which I thought was weird) and that instead of shells, the shoreline was covered in chunks of dead coral.  Huh.  We walked a bit and picked up some shells, but we could tell it was really about to rain and we didn't want to get soaked before getting back in the car.  I got to see the coast, at least!  I wonder why the sand is black.  I always though that had something to do with volcanoes.  Oh, well.  I got my shells and sand, and we went back to the hotel.

I had every intention of cleaning up and going back out, but once I got back to the hotel, I hit a wall and I hit it HARD.  I had gotten a shower (because of frickin' course I did. I've had a million showers since I've been here!!!!) and I had decided to reorganize my luggage to making packing easier, and I don't know if it was a blood sugar thing, or if all the walking and irregular sleeping and things just decided to pile up on me all at once, but I went down.  I didn't faint, exactly, but I had to lie down and not move for a bit.  My body just said "Nope."  I was pissed.  Here it was, my last night here, and I was lying in a hotel room and not doing anything!  However, sometimes you have to listen to your body, I guess.  I think it must have been a low blood sugar thing.  We finally decided to just forgo going anywhere else and just ordered room service again.  Heh, it was kind of funny, actually.  We didn't want much for dinner, so we both ordered grilled cheese sandwiches and fries off of the children's menu.  I don't know if room service people mind if adults order off of the kid's menu or not, but we didn't care and they didn't know we didn't have kids up here.  We had also found Star Wars: A New Hope playing on TV, so of course you know we were watching that.  It only occurred to me later how silly we must have looked to the waitress, to have been in our room, watching Star Wars and ordering grilled cheese sandwiches. :) At least we weren't wearing footie pajamas.  I mean, I didn't even bring mine!

I felt better after we ate and I finished the packing stuff I wanted to.  Now I'm sad that we're leaving tomorrow. I really love it here, even with the sweating.

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: HOLY CITY EDITION

September 22, 2016

Happy first day of fall!  Not that it feels like fall. Eh, well hat was I expecting?  Heehee.

Steve didn't have to go into the office to work today, so we actually got to spend some time together this morning! We got breakfast and then sat around in the lobby of the hotel and chatted a bit. We finally parted ways so that he could do his homework and I headed back out to explore some more.

I realized last night that I didn't bring any clothes or shoes suitable for going to the beach, even if I was just going to walk around and not swim.  Greeeeeeeeat.  What was I thinking? I probably don't have to tell you that most of the cutesy boutique clothing shops around here don't cater to the bodaciously fluffy kind of woman that I am, even though I'm not exactly completely out of the "straight" sizes. I figured that it wouldn't be easy to find something to wear. Luckily, the very thing I complained about yesterday actually helped me. I walked to the GAP and got some shorts! Hooray for the GAP!

After that I just sort of wondered around for a while looking for some shenanigans to get involved in. I walked all the way to the visitors center and grabbed a tour bus. I really should have done that on my first day, but I got really excited about being able to walk everywhere I wanted to go. I'm not so excited about that now, so I paid to take a "General History" tour. The tour was ok, but I was disappointed that the driver didn't give us more specific history concerning things that happened around here. He did give us the history of the town itself, and about a couple of the houses, but I think he spent more time talking about the colleges here in the city. I was still glad to have taken the tour, because at least I know now that I went to most of the major things that I would have wanted to see. I missed a couple of the house museums, but that's fine. Maybe the only thing I won't get a chance to see is the French Quarter, but it is mostly restaurants, so unless I want to go from restaurant to restaurant and eat, which actually sounds like a pretty good idea now that I think of it, I am ok not going back! 

I actually left the tour bus before we got back to the visitor's center. His tour was technically over, and he gave us the option to get off and take a trolley back to wherever we were going. I got off because I wanted to look around the market one more time and then I could just walk back to the hotel.  Before I could look around too much, Steve texted me to let me know he was done with work, so I walked back and we ate together.  We had plans for later, so we came back to the hotel for a bit so I could clean up. 

I feel like this whole cleaning up thing has taken up way too much of my time here in Charleston.  I just really hate feeling sweaty unless I specifically want to be sweaty, you know?

We hung around the hotel until it was time for us to leave, and we walked back down past Market Street to meet our tour group.  We were going on a ghost tour!  Woot! I love, love, love going on ghost tours.  I really do think it's the best way to learn about a city.  I mean, sure, you have to listen to ghost stories, and mileage may vary on that depending on your feelings on the supernatural, but the tour guides usually have a real passion about the history of the city that your in, so you get a lot of the normal history along with the ghosties.  Our tour was pretty good, although like the bus tour, I thought there would be more to it.  Not that it wasn't fun and informative and all that, but I still thought there would me more stories.  We did learn that Edgar Allan Poe's legendary "Annabelle Lee" is allegedly buried in a kind of out-of-the-way graveyard just off of King St. so that was pretty cool.  The tour took us all over and lasted for about 2 hours.  By the time it was over, Steve and I were hot, sweaty, tired, and starving.  We had not eaten dinner before going on this thing, and I don't have any idea what we were thinking.  We felt too gross to go into a restaurant, so we went back to the hotel and got room service.

I love room service, even though it seems kind of hedonistic.  I don't know why it does, really, other than someone else cooks and brings you food that you can eat without wearing pants, but it was good!  We ended up staying up rather later than we had intended to, but it was a fun day.  I slept kind of hard.