Black Oak's Daughter

I really am considering revamping this whole blog site. Maybe I’d come write more often if it didn’t stare at me every time I log in and question when I’m going to give it some love.  I have ideas!  IDEAS people!  and absolutely no time.  I’ll get to it though, hang in there.

So, it’s been a month since I wrote last. That month has been another roller coaster.

After a very long, costly few years that had a messy divorce and 3 different surgeries in it, all of which I’ve somehow physically survived, things have been closing in on me financially for a while now. It’s getting pretty bad, and I’ve been working hard to try and figure out how to fix it.  I had to reach out to a few people to get some answers, but I finally have some hope.

The last straw was the water heater a couple of weeks ago. That camel’s back didn’t have a chance.

My poor water heater. My dear departed water heater. I can live without the dishwasher that’s been broken for a few months. I can live without a working garage door opener, but the water heater is not something that I’ll give up without a fight. My water heater,  that gave it’s life so that I could have hot showers for the last 15+ years split, leaked, and died on April Fools Day. I thought Roomie was playing a joke on me when I turned on the water for a shower that morning and it came out ice cold. He thought the same thing when he went to shower later. It wasn’t a joke. It was dead.

I can’t complain because it was rated for 8 years and it hadn’t been flushed for ages. I got my money out of it, but it picked the exact wrong month to check out. It’s replacement cost more than the $500 that I had put aside. Those particular dollars were earmarked to go to Uncle Sam. They went to Lowes instead, so now Uncle Sam is waiting for it until I get my bonus next month.  He can wait, it’s only 1/2 of a percent per month, and it’s only one month, so I can deal with that $3.50 in interest.

The actual installation of the new water heater took three days of boiling my bathwater on the stove before Roomie  (1) had time between jobs  to learn how to make the connections to the new unit, (2) had time to figure out what the hell my ex did when he connected the last one (3) remove everything my ex did because I was married to Tim the Tool and everything he ineptly fixed always has to be stripped off all the way back to the bare starting point, and (4) make the proper connections, without any trouble really. Roomie got it done!  Which is excellent, because Lowes wanted an extra $350 that I absolutely didn’t have to make those 4 stupid connections. Seriously. $350. Two water pipes, a gas line, and a chimney that drafts right into the house chimney. It’s not rocket science, it takes less than an hour when you don’t have to figure it out every step of the way like we did, and I have way better things to do with my extra $350, like keep the lights on.

I’m in the wrong line of work. $350 an hour… dang.

So, after that sucktacular event that took every freakin penny I had saved toward my taxes, I was first thankful that I’d actually had that money saved, and secondly I sort of cried Uncle to the universe. Seriously, I try not to dwell on the negative, but there’s only so many times you can get kicked in the proverbial stones before you can’t get up anymore.  I was on my knees, and apparently the universe heard me. Whew.

I’m not gonna spill the beans too much here, but if the plan works, I have a very close family member who I never thought (a) I’d have to ask for a short term loan that will enable me to rearrange some debt, and (b) they’d be able to help. Turns out I barely needed to ask and they not only are going to help in a few months when they have enough saved to help me, but in the end I’ll end up with a very nice upgrade to something that will allow me to finish paying off my debt while alleviating a huge worry. I’m not going to jinx it by writing out the details, but HOLY COW!  I just need to hang on for a few months, then I’ll be able to breathe again.

I believe that what goes around comes around, and heaven knows I’ve given until it hurts more than once, but for the rescue package that’s coming, I’m seriously humbled and proud of my family, and humbled, and seriously, on my knees humbled. And Proud. Wow. And Grateful.

I’ll talk more about it once it all happens and I’m able to breathe again. Until then, I’m holding my breath, praying hard, and holding on as best as I can.

Namaste

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I haven’t had much to say lately. So I’ll just spew words for  bit and see what comes out…

• I work for a wholly American owned subsidiary of a division of a very large Japanese company. We work very closely with our Japanese parent company. Part of my job is working with my global counterparts in other foreign subsidiaries that are also owned by our parent company.  The disaster in Japan that is still happening as I write this, does not affect our supply chain, but it has significantly slowed communication between us and Tokyo. My heart goes out to them. Most of them are safe in Tokyo, and have been able to get word out to us that they are just having difficulty traveling to the office and things like that.  We will keep our business going and be patient as they clean up after the earthquake and tsunami. We will, with our hearts in our throats, watch, and hope with every bit of hope that can be mustered, that the nuke plants will somehow not melt down through the containment vessels and horribly contaminate things there.

• My brother’s death a few weeks ago was a shock, but in the couple of days that followed, thanks to my other brother, I got some clarity about why things were so bad when we were growing up.  It was a hard situation. I won’t go into the gory details here, but what became clear to me was the source of the ongoing pain for all of us. It wasn’t my father’s death, or my mother’s ongoing illness. Those things were something that we could have dealt with much better if we had been a unified family. We were never that. I knew that my brothers never got along, what I didn’t know was that my oldest brother was the source of that. My oldest brother did something the week after our middle brother died that clarified his role in the pain that has always been part of our lives. He is unforgiving, unrepentant, and relentless in his pursuit of proving that he’s won. In his mind, he’s the better brother, he always has been, and now he’s victorious merely by surviving longer than my other brother. Knowing what he did a couple of weeks ago, and reframing our childhood with that knowledge, makes it so much easier to understand why my beautiful big hearted middle brother was so tortured his whole life, and why when it was just the two of us together without our oldest brother, there was so much love there. I’m unbelievably angry, and unbearably sad about that whole situation. I can’t even think about forgiveness yet. It’s going to take me a while to work through this one.

• On a good note: My best friend is making me proud. She’s moved into her own place, worked out custody with her soon to be ex, gotten a decent pat on the back at work and is being moved laterally into a new position that will open more doors for her. She’s also stayed relatively healthy considering she’s still battling a lupus flare, through all of it.  She did all of that as gracefully and maturely as possible, and is focusing forward on making her future much happier and less complicated.  I’m a proud cheerleader for her. She’s really shown what she’s made of through it all.

• Minime and her husband TechSupport (how’s that for a blogname?) are landing on their feet after some changes in their lives too. He’s employed again. It’s not his dream job but it will pay the bills while he looks for his dream job, and she got a job offer this morning for a position that starts next month.  This all means that they aren’t moving 2 days drive from me yet, for which I’m both happy and sad. I think they’d be really happy in their destination city, it’s beautiful and the lifestyle is much more active there, but it’s also very far from me and I’d miss my little girl very much.  It’s inevitable that it will happen eventually, but for the next year, maybe, she’s still within a distance where I can drive out and have lunch with her if I feel like it. So YAY! and Boo!. Such is life.

So, life is a little intense right now. I’m doing my best to get through it.

There are lots of little things making me smile. I’ve been playing a game online where I’m in a group of mostly older gamers that have all reached a level of success in life.  I’ve actually uncovered a pretty cool business opportunity there with a great guy that happens to run 6 facilities for a major manufacturer.  He’s buying about $1500 in equipment from my company. It’s a small sale, but it’s been so long since I’ve been an actual sales rep, I’d forgotten how much of a charge I get out of helping people find solutions for their problems with our stuff.   It’s a small world, and you never know where your next customer will come from huh? who would have ever thought Warcraft was a business opportunity

Roomie has been working on building his business, and sharing with me all of the things that he’s learning. I enjoy that on a lot of levels. I love to witness people struggling through the learning process enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and almost invariably, Roomie gets one thing figured out and that leads him to the next issue. Then he tells me about the next issue that he’s stumbled on that he’ll need to figure out, and a few days later he’ll have figured it out and tells me all about it. Wash, rinse, repeat.  I get a charge out of seeing him learn. He may have 20 years on me, but he’s still engaged with learning and living. I need to take a lesson from him on that.

My life has been kind of stalled lately and I need to kick it into gear and soon.  I’ve never felt so old as I do right now. I need to re-engage with something that I can be passionate about. Spring is coming, my camera will come out soon, that’s one thing.  I’m also thinking about getting into a personal training program to get some of the stamina back that I’ve lost over the past few years recovering from surgery after surgery.

The agenda of things like that is long, but the energy to pursue it is being sucked down by this wave of depression, grief, and just having no energy physically for anything other than functioning at work, and keeping the house going and bills mostly paid.  I’m really pushing for a promotion at work too. That would at least alleviate the financial pressure and give me space to focus on anything else for a while.

That’s it for now. This got longer than I thought it would. I guess there’s a lot rolling around in my head, huh?

Namaste.

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Writing has always been my therapy, ever since I could write.  I’m struggling for words. The feelings are all there intensely, but the words haven’t come yet.

My big brother, the one that I looked up to in spite of his demons; the one that always watched over me, protected me, and made me laugh when I needed it; my beautiful, big hearted, lug of a brother that wanted nothing more in life than to be loved and accepted by his family, passed away monday.

I take comfort in the fact that after a long time apart for really stupid reasons, I saw him a year and a half ago and we made our peace with each other. I wrote this about that day:

Big Bro still has a Big Heart and we did nothing but smile and hug and talk. There’s been so much pain in his life, emotional and physical. He’s got some health issues now and so do I, getting together was important before either of us go through anything else.  A lot went unsaid but it didn’t really need to be said either.  I drove 1200 miles one way to see my brother, and honestly, I’d have driven twice that far to get to hug him again. Next time I’ll spend more than a day with them too.  I miss my Big Bro. He’s always looked out for me. He still did when I visited. After we toured around the lake near him, we went for lunch and talked, and he made sure I knew how to get back to the highway. He’s really a very sweet old lug of a brother. He’s changed a lot. So have I. The love between us remains. I got my big brother back.

Thank God we had that day.  There was also a string of e-mails that led up to that day where we both said so much about the past, and putting it behind us, and more importantly both said “I love you” and meant it.

I am devastated by his death. There will be no funeral, he made sure of that himself. Just one day he was there, and now he’s not. I will have my own private memorial for him when I’m ready.

For now I’ll tell you about these pictures. Pardon the quality, these are from an old box of slides that I found in our parents stuff a few years ago. I was afraid of cleaning them because they were already so degraded, so they aren’t brilliant, but I will always treasure them.

When we were kids, and our Dad was still alive, we’d spend several weeks every summer at a campground that was near Dad’s father’s place. It was about a seven hour drive from home, and that drive was L O N G for us kids but we always had a good time. Well, except for that time the tornado came across the lake and hopped right over our tent but that’s a whole other story.

We always got the same camp site at the campground. It was on sort of a point, that had water on two sides, so we had lake front property for a few weeks a year .   We had access to this little fishing dock, and BigBro and I spent some time there every day. He’d bait my hook so I didn’t hurt myself on the sharp point, then he’d cast my line out, because that took more coordination that I had at 4 or 5 years old. Then he’d hand it to me, and get his line in the water too. Then we’d both slowly reel the line in, and repeat the process, unless one of us got a fish.  If we hooked one, regardless of who’s rod it was on, he’d hang on to the rod so I didn’t get pulled into the water, and he let me reel it in.

He was patient and kind with his little brat of a sister.  In the pic above, I was 4 and he was 11, in the one below, probably one year younger.  We weren’t always together at the campground. He was into hunting snakes, and other such boy things that I wasn’t interested in, but every day, usually in the morning, we spent some time on that dock.  In retrospect, he was probably watching me while mom made breakfast, but I remember looking forward to my time on that dock with him. I loved being on the water and he was always the outdoors type.

This pic below shows our camp site. That was a 7 man tent on the left, and the one wheel trailer that we hauled all the gear in is behind the clothes line and in front of the canopy that was over the picnic table.

He spent the last few years of his life living in a beautiful rural place about an hour from the Blue Ridge mountains, and near a lake that is a lot like the one from when we were kids.  He had been quite ill since they moved there, and hadn’t explored the lake yet, so the day I visited we went for a drive and checked out all the different recreation areas around the lake.  I took a couple hundred pictures, some of him too. There were a couple of docks that we walked out on and smiled and remembered fishing on that little dock at the camp.  It was a good day.

I will never forget it.

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I was requested, by the person that I’m avoiding writing about, to start blogging again… so let’s be a little random…

I made this today. Except I used organic whole wheat flour, organic bananas, and a little milk instead of the sour cream. It was Better Than Mom’s, even without the chocolate chips.  You really don’t need the honey butter, which is good because I didn’t make it,  The bread just happened to come out of the oven right before dinner, so dinner was way too much banana bread and some of the home made chicken/veggie salad that roomie  made earlier.  Belly is happy.

In other news… I think I’ve figured out my financial mess enough to say that if the plan flies, I will be debt free in a couple of years. After the past few months of just barely making it to the bank finally breaking this month and having to borrow the electric bill money, there is light at the end of that tunnel. I really hope the plan flies. I’ll know next week. Maybe the Lunar new year will bring me a little luck

We are slowly becoming raw dieters at home. There are a few necessities that we’ve been gathering over the last couple of months, the grocery budget has been restricted by the need to not be homeless or cold, so that’s been a little slow. We have been eating better, fresher, healthier when the budget allows, and soon it will allow a little better. I have discovered a few things already.

• Organic beef gives me a stomach ache faster than regular beef. I think giving up beef won’t be difficult at all.
• You can flavor a bowl of chopped up raw veggies with nearly any dressing and it’s yummy.
• Eating this way has killed 95% of my cravings. That is kind of amazing.
• Cats don’t beg much when they don’t smell meat cooking first.

So life goes on at Casa Grania. Tomorrow I’ll be helping my best friend move. She’s got a whole new life ahead of her and I’m really proud of how she’s been handling some really tough things. She is who I haven’t been writing about, and I’ll continue that, except to highlight the good things. We haven’t been walking lately, more out of midwinter in the midwest necessity, but we have been getting together almost weekly and talking through the messier things. I’ve been helping with what guidance I can give, and offering a shoulder when there’s nothing else to do but be quiet together and know that life will get better even if right now sucks royally.  We’re a pair, the two of us. When life goes bad, it goes really bad, but the pay off happens when we hit the other end of that scale and life is good. We are both very blessed, and very focused on that, and the more you give something your full attention, the more it propagates itself. It’s working, things are getting better.

Oh.. yesterday, Minime was in town.  She took me to lunch at the mall where the Apple store is (because my power cord went bad, they replaced it) and then after lunch we ran around to a few stores and she spoiled me rotten. I got lotions (75% off!), and 2 bath bombs that I love, and a few lego keychains to complete the set, and a couple of hugs, all from her.  Awesome!  We usually get little trinkets for each other on holidays, but I’ve been seriously broke, so Christmas was lean and I haven’t even thought about any of the upcoming ones. She really had fun making me happy too. She handed me the lotions and said “Happy Valentines Day” and then the legos were for St Nicks, etc. She rocks. We have all of these seemingly silly traditions like little gifts for little holidays, and she’s carrying them on. That makes me happy too.

Today she got a new (used) car that is pretty cool. The timing’s a bit strange for a new car, but things will work out. She got a deal, and a friend bought her old car, so the situation kind of just happened and they jumped at it. Her husband is very close to a new job (as in through several phone interviews, checked his references, and now they’re flying him down there to meet him), and then it’s all good.  I’ll stop worrying when he signs on there.

OK BFF, I blogged. Now what??

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Hi Y’all,

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m kind of taking a break from writing. There are some things going on around me that need some TLC and not to be written about, so I’m taking a break. Life is good at Casa Grania, no worries here. The holidays were excellent too.  Thanks for askin’.

Pretty much my only resolution this year was to try 100 new fruits.  It will probably take longer than a year to do that but that’s OK. I don’t really do resolutions, so we’ll just call it a goal and go with it.  The starfruit that I started with was pretty good. Kind of unusual and citrusy, but not a stringy mess like oranges can be. I don’t eat oranges because I can’t handle the texture. Starfruit are OK texture wise but the taste was a bit tart.  I ended up eating 2 slices of it and then throwing the rest into my morning smoothie. It worked well in there.  I think kumquats are next. I’m curious about them, and whole foods has them, so I’ll get a couple and see the next time I go there.

In the news here, Roomie and I are transitioning ourselves to a new diet. There’s a definite learning curve to this, and some equipment to get, but we both think it’s the right way to be healthy.  We are learning how to prepare and eat raw food (not meat, it’s cooked, but we’re eating much less of it).  I don’t know if we’ll go totally vegan or keep a little high quality meat around, but it’s been fun learning to do nutrition this way.  I’m investigating a couple of places around here that sell organic produce by the box for $25 a week, and also there’s a place to get grass fed meat for relatively inexpensive prices compared to the health food stores around here that carry it.  The more I study about this kind of food, the more I’m convinced that it will go a long way toward improving my health and well being.

All of it is pretty cool, and the best part is that I have a man in my life that’s leading me to be healthy and happy instead of dragging me down. That in itself blows me away, but it is also how it should be. We’re here to make each other better people, not to get sucked down into each other’s misery. Right?

In other news, my friend James finally sucked me into playing Warcraft.  It helped that Minime had a free year’s subscription that she offloaded to me. I’ve missed serious gaming almost as much as I’ve missed making music, so it’s a good way for me to re-engage for a few hours a week and get that out of my system. That’s taken the place of writing for now.  Don’t worry, I’ll have plenty to write about in a couple of months, but my priorities right now include protecting my friend, so rather than risk it, I’ll just go kill goblins and orks and stuff

Now I just have to get my piano moved upstairs…

That’s it for now

Namaste

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I love the holidays. The lights, the trees, the food, the music, the parties, family and friends, and when it’s over, I love that too, because I have enough warm memories to get me through the next couple of months of brutal arctic Chicago winters.

I can’t even imagine trying to do Christmas the way it was when I was married. Such a hassle, so many gifts, the money crunch, the elaborate meals that were criticized, never enough gifts to make a person happy.  I used to aim for perfect. No pressure there huh? The perfect distribution of lights and ornaments on the tree, the perfect table setting, perfect gift wrapping the perfect gifts, perfect cookie plates with hundreds of dozens of cookies each year, the perfect cards with the perfect family’s perfect update. Except we were far from perfect. The whole thing was an act. The whole experience was frustrating and meaningless. We were chasing our tails, trying to put on the best christmas pageant we could for our families, making ourselves exhausted and miserable, and every year it got worse because we had to out do the year before. Happy fricken ho ho ho.

Good Lord I’m glad that ended.

My ife is much different now. I need to impress no one. I still enjoy some of it. Making Thanksgiving dinner for Roomie, sharing goodies with friends throughout the season, all of it brings smiles and sometimes even a hug.  The decorations are pretty, but really, if there’s a gap in the tree, there’s a gap in the tree. It’s a tree. No Big Deal.  I have my traditions. Setting up my mother’s Creche on the buffet, her ornaments are always on the tree, and I make the candy and a few batches of cookies that I learned to make from her. I’ve added more of my own recipes too. New traditions mix with the old, and now Minime has some of her own traditions too. Life marches on, as it should. I’m at a point in my life where I see how the past is connected with the future.

This year, was Roomie and my 4th Thanksgiving together.  We made a good meal, turkey breast, with the trimmings that we like, and had our normal conversations throughout the day. It was a nice, laid back, busy but wonderful day.

Friday gave me more reason to be thankful. My daughter and her husband have some challenges in their life right now, but they made a pretty substantial investment in new technology for him to use and they let me know that I’d be benefiting too. They asked me how I’d feel about getting a gently used MacBook for Christmas. I’ve never had a Mac before, so I asked her a lot of questions that she dutifully answered, and she alleviated my worries about making the shift from the Microsoft world over to the Mac.   Then she told me that if I wanted to come out there Saturday, it would probably be ready for me to take it home. HOLY COW!!!  So, I’m writing this on my shiny new (t0 me) MacBook.

Not only did they load it with some good software, my very cool son in law transferred over my e-mail and I got enough pictures and music moved over that I can already use this machine as my primary one. I still have plenty to do to get it set up the way I want, but that was major, and he did it in very little time.  So I have an early Christmas present and It Rocks. The best part was that my daughter was really truly happy that she was making me happy, relieving my worries about my crappy laptop that was overheating every 10 minutes, and where I’d get the cash to replace it when the processor went down that one last time.  She asked me a lot if I was happy, and if it was the best Christmas present I’d ever gotten. She was so excited that she did something that got her mom excited.  I teased her and told her that the Barbie Camper that I got when I was a kid was REALLY COOL. She smiled. Yes, Minime, I can’t think of a present that matches this. But, it’s not so much the present that matters as the spirit in which it’s given.  THAT is what Christmas SHOULD be about. She was so excited about giving it.

She and her husband gave me something that they knew I would use and enjoy, and it’s not every day that they can do that for me, also, I have an awesome kid that takes care of her mom when she can. That is what makes Christmas.  The computer is nice, but that they enjoyed the act of giving so much is where this mom’s payoff happened.

As for the rest of Christmas. It will be laid back, relaxed, no hurry, no pressure. The tree will probably come out of the crawl space today or tomorrow. The wreath that’s on my front door lived in my car for half a week before I got it out and hung it. The decorations are nice, but the loved ones are what I look forward to.  My gifts this year are modest, but I put some thought into them. Every detail may not be perfect, but hopefully there will be many meaningful moments.

Perfection is far too lofty a goal anymore. I do the best that I can, and some of the details that I attend to are only special to me, but they are still special.  The gatherings get smaller every year.  My family has spread out quite a bit and the cousins don’t travel back for holidays. They have their own traditions where they are and that’s OK.

We got our first snow of the year overnight. It feels like a good day to decorate.

Namaste.

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Thanksgiving was pretty wonderful, thanks! How was yours?

Roomie made his traditional and yummy green bean/potato/bacon goodness in a pot.  I made the turkey breast, stuffing (eh, too mushy), baked sweet potatoes, pecan pie, cheesecake, and opened the can of cranberry stuff.  That’s it.  I set the table with the good china and silverware, we had candle light and just talked the way we always do.   Nothing remarkable, but I feel so blessed. Roomie is a positive force in my life, and we’re both, for different reasons, somewhat reclusive so I’m OK with just him and me at Thanksgiving dinner. I want it to be a nice meal, but I don’t stress about it like I used to when 15 or 20 people were coming over. We had a friend invited, but she got a few invites and one meant more to her daughter, so she went there.

Minime is allergic to turkey, Thanksgiving always included lasagna when she was around. Now she’s started her own tradition with her friends where she lives  and that’s all good. She and hewhostilldoesn’thaveablogname have a good life. I’m thankful for that too. I’ll see her tomorrow when bff and I take bff’s daughter back to school 20 minutes from Minime.  We’ll spend the evening gaming and talking, and just spending time together.

That’s what I want more than anything during the holidays. Time with my loved ones is somehow a little more important this year. Along with that, Minime is probably moving farther away soon, so a few hour drive isn’t going to be the way to see her on a whim anymore. I’m bummed, but their circumstances are changing and they’ll land on their feet, but it will probably require relocation to a more tech friendly town.

I did most of my Christmas shopping this morning, on line, in my PJs. It’s 15 degrees out, there’s no way you’d catch me waiting for a store to open at 5 am. I just have two more people to shop for, and two more gifts to make.  No big deal. The days of the overboard Christmas gifts, and something for everyone that I work with are over.  I’m on a budget for gifts this year and I should come in about $50 under that if everything goes well with those last few things. I’ve toned way down on the materialism since my ex is gone. He was the leader of that endeavor. If there was a new toy available he had to have it.  I’m happy with a bunch of hugs and a few good meals with loved ones. I’ve got enough stuff.

That being said, sometimes paying it forward works.  I gave my 92 year old aunt my last (good, Gateway when it was still Gateway) laptop when I bought this one that I’m typing on. That was cool because she’s using it to type out her memories/memoirs for her grandchildren. We’ve all been enjoying the bits of stories that she’s shared with each of us. She’s really working hard on them. It’s given her new purpose. I love that I helped do that and I had a new computer so instead of letting the old one sit there, it’s being useful.

I really thought that my new laptop would be better for me. Then, 8 months after I got it, the new one started overheating.

It’s been limping along for a couple of months now. Its poorly designed. I should have known better than to buy a Gateway now that they’re really owned by Acer but I talked myself into it because the price was right. Acer is low end and this one feels like it.  I have an i3(really good) processor that isn’t vented enough to keep the machine from overheating (really bad for it).  It’s great for typing posts, and surfing blogs and news sites, but when it gets to doing anything that uses the processor, like photo editing, watching videos, or game playing, it overheats in about 10 minutes.  I cleaned what I could get to a couple of weeks ago and that helped but it’s still shutting down in the middle of stuff and aside from that being annoying, I’m sure that it’s taking it’s toll on the computer.

So, tomorrow when I go to Minime and HWSDHABN’s, they are giving me one of their macbooks (SCORE!!!)  It’s “gently used” by my son in law, but with 4 gb ram, a new battery and I’ll put a new hard drive into it next year and IT DOESN’T RANDOMLY TURN OFF!!!!  They just got a new MacBookPro, so I get the cast off. I don’t care, it’s a Mac, and it’s way friggin better than this stupid Acer POS.

So there’s more to be thankful for. 1. My girl takes care of me. 2. a decent computer that DOESN’T RANDOMLY SHUT OFF and 3. I get to pay it forward again with the laptop that I’ll no longer be using. It’s a POS for me because most of what I do is graphics intense, but it’s perfectly fine for someone who doesn’t do all of that stuff. I have someone in mind. She’ll appreciate it. YAY!

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The project that I’ve been commissioned to do is in the hands of the commissioners. They will give me a list of what needs fixing, and then I’ll do the final stuff, package it up, and be done with it. The next time I volunteer to do a nearly 400 page digital scrapbook, even if it is simple and elegant and easy, remind me of this one… please.

I am glad I did it though. I learned a lot, and the software that I used worked up to it’s potential. It did everything it says that it does and I’m really pleased about that.  It’s called My Memories Suite, and it’s really robust as far as what you can do with it.  It came with a coupon for free templates, so I downloaded a couple that helped me with this last project, and another one that’s for making a cookbook, so I think that will be my next project.  It’s fun to play with it to see what I can create.

I haven’t been felling very creative lately.  The post-surgical depression got a pretty good grip on me for a long enough time that my creative juices were buried by my desire to just lay low and figure things out. That’s a big part of the reason I haven’t been writing too.  I’m starting to feel like maybe I’m beginning to see the light at the end of that tunnel.  This last surgery hit me harder than I expected. I still hurt, and now that I’m exercising more, I hurt more, but it’s necessary. I have to get back on the healthy train. I was doing really well, and I’m getting my head back into that mindset slowly.  The first thing is that I have to lead with exercise. Dieting doesn’t work alone, and the motivation to eat well, for me, comes from the fact that I put a hell of a lot of effort into moving my body and getting my muscles back into shape. I’ve been doing what I was advised and am working my way back up to an elliptical routine that is tough enough to release the endorphans that I need. I have to balance that with care so it’s not killer on my knees, my remaining kidney, or any other body parts. I’m nothing if not patient, with everyone but myself. This is an exercise in learning patience with myself. I’ll get there eventually. I’ve been sleeping a little better because of the exercise too, so it has multiple benefits.

This week has been jam packed with real life too. One friend in divorce court for unnecessary hearings brought on by her uncompromising ex, my son in law was laid off (with the best severance package I’ve ever heard of short of him being a bank executive), a friend at work is transferring out to the field and struggling a little about being on her own. It will be SO good for her, she’s just got to get there. There’s just STUFF  happening everywhere. Things are changing quickly for a lot of people, and my job is support staff. I don’t mind a bit, each of those people was there to support me through some hard things, but dang the universe is busy. I don’t mind, it makes me feel useful sometimes just to listen and offer support. I only have 2 ears though.  Today I had my friend on the phone, my daughter was IMing me, and of course all of this was while I was at work trying to keep things going there. It gets interesting sometimes.

One good thing: I spent a good part of today writing checks to pay off every freakin doctor bill (except the one I’m contesting) and one other bill that’s been hanging over me for nearly a year. They’re all paid.  The spendable part of my bonus is mostly gone, but I HATE having bills hanging over my head so I’ll look at it as a blessing that I have the means to pay them, even if it is my fun money.  I spent a bit of the project money that I’ve earned on a new coat, and a new shirt. I need a few more new things to mix into my wardrobe, but I’m good at surfing clearance racks and stuff so I’m giving myself $100 for clothes. After that,  I might have enough left to carpet the living room. I have to sit down and crunch some numbers before I commit to that.  It might wait until my next bonus in the spring, but I’d really like new carpet for the holidays. We’ll see what I can work out.  My next financial project is to pay off one credit card in the next year.  It’s doable, but I’ll have to live broke for a while. I feel better about that now that my savings account has a little buffer in it again.

Another good thing: My friends from Virginia will be in town this weekend. Hopefully we can get together and do something fun.

Namaste

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