Things are looking a bit better than they were when I wrote my last post. Far from perfect, but better. I still don’t feel comfortable writing about what happened, and I don’t know if I ever will. Maybe someday.
I’m still under a great deal of stress. Maybe not quite as much as I was a few days ago – I guess instead of feeling like the weight of the world is on my shoulders, it feels more like a giant kettlebell now. At least it’s an improvement. And at least I’ve been able to get some writing done. I’m still behind, though.
I just hope things can get back to normal for my family now. Or better than normal. Whatever, as long as it’s not like it has been lately.
You may have noticed that I have been posting in radical spurts lately. For that I apologize.
There’s just a lot of crap going on in my life right now. I’ve written a little about the problems that I personally have been having, and they’re not really getting much better. I’ve had a good day or two, but I’m beginning to lose hope that things will ever get back to the way they were. And I’m also dealing with some problems that I really don’t feel comfortable writing about.
If it was all about me, I might be willing to share them. But it’s not. It involves someone who I love very dearly, and I’m not sure that person would want me to write about what’s been going on. I don’t want to ask, either, because they’re going through so much right now.
I will say that the whole ordeal is making it even harder for me to get any writing done, when I can even be in front of the computer. But I’m hanging on for dear life, because writing is the only thing that I can fathom doing with my life.
Anyway, I’ve got missed deadlines to attend to. So that’s all for now.
My husband is a great guy, but sometimes he drives me nuts. Especially when he gets fed up with his job and won’t listen to me when I tell him to look for something else.
We’ve been down this road enough times that I know what to expect. A job starts getting on his nerves, and he says he’s going to quit. I remind him that he needs to find another job first, and he says he will. Then he doesn’t even bother looking for anything else.
The problems keep building and building, until it’s so bad he can’t take it any more. Yet again I remind him that he needs to find another job before he quits the one he’s at, and yet again he says he will. Then he finally starts looking, and settles for the first thing he finds, even if it’s really not much of anything at all. This is how he ended up working for a guy who offered him a full-time job, worked insane amounts of overtime for a couple of weeks, and then disappeared and wouldn’t return Hubby’s calls.
It makes me so nervous when this kind of thing happens. I know that he means well, and that he wouldn’t intentionally do anything to put us in a bind, but he needs to start thinking ahead. If he would, he could find a decent job instead of ending up grasping at straws.
It’s hard enough for him to find a job that suits him. He doesn’t have any licensing or certifications that would help him find anything that pays really well. And besides that, he is really picky about what kinds of jobs he will tolerate. He worked in a factory for a while, but I know that he would go stir crazy if he had to stare at a rackmount LCD screen for a living again.
I’ve gotten mad and told him that he needs to just do whatever it takes to support his family, but I also know what it’s like to be stuck in a job you hate. It makes life miserable, and in most cases it ends up badly. All I can do is just keep after him to look for something else and hope it sinks in. Because the way the job market is right now, he won’t be able to find a job at a moment’s notice.
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was already starting on my Christmas shopping, thanks to some free stuff I’ve scored. The only problem is that I’m running out of people to give it to!
My mom’s gift is already taken care of. The only other adults on my list are Hubby and his parents and brothers. He said he was just going to buy everyone in his family cigarettes, because they’re always bumming for them. Now, I’ve got a free photo book offer that I need to redeem, and I can’t figure out who to give it to. Hubby wouldn’t appreciate it, and I doubt my siblings and I will be exchanging gifts. We quit doing that a couple of years ago, when they stopped taking frequent Orlando vacations due to budget concerns. So I’m thinking about just getting one made for myself.
It’s not like I haven’t done it before. The one year when Hubby and I did pretty well for ourselves, I bought myself a stereo for Christmas. I wanted one, and he wasn’t going to shell out for it, so I decided I might as well go for it. I think I at least deserve a photo book this year, especially if it’s free.
I’ve also got some gift certificates for photo canvases that I need to distribute. I think I might have found one taker, but there are still four more left. Hmm, maybe I’ll have a giveaway. Stay tuned if you’re interested!
Do you ever miss your high school or college days? I do. More college than high school for me, though. Maybe it’s because I was such a nobody in high school and had a lot more fun in college. But then I guess it wasn’t so much college itself that caused that as a shift in my attitudes and getting away from the people who I grew up with that assumed that they had me all figured out.
Whatever it was, I have found myself missing those two years of my life a lot lately. But you can’t go back. Sure, I could go back to school and get my bachelor’s degree, and even sign up for some GMAT prep courses and try to get into graduate school. But it just wouldn’t be the same. Times have changed, and I’ve changed. You know how it goes.
I don’t think I could muster the motivation to get another degree, even if I wanted to. I’m having trouble getting motivated to do just about anything, so going back to school right now probably wouldn’t be wise. Maybe one day. Or maybe not.
And I’ve already started my Christmas shopping! I think this is a new world record for me! I’m one of those who tends to do a lot of my shopping on Christmas Eve, so I should probably mark this down on the calendar.
Okay, so you can’t exactly call it shopping, because it was free. You see, I was lucky enough to get in on Kodak Gallery’s big giveaway and get a $15 gift certificate. I had planned to use it to get a picture of my mom, my siblings and myself blown up to 16×20, frame it and give it to my mom for Christmas. But since I had to crop the photo, the resolution was too low to make it that big. So instead, I ordered 8x10s for all of us, plus 5x7s of Pumpkin, my brother’s daughter and my sister’s youngest daughter. I’m still going to frame Mom’s 8×10 and give it to her for Christmas, and will just hand the rest out as-is.
Once I get the bills paid, I just might do a little more shopping. I hear a lot of online stores are doing early Black Friday stuff already, so I’ll be sure to check that out. And I need to check on some Amazon gift certificates that I should have gotten but haven’t. I’m thinking if I spread my shopping out and take advantage of some more freebies (like the free photo book I just scored from Shutterfly this morning), Christmas might be a little easier to deal with this year than it has been.
I swear there’s a black hole somewhere in my bathroom. Things in there just keep disappearing at random intervals. And it’s driving me nuts!
Several months ago, I had a bottle of Neutrogena foundation. It was a new formula that a survey company had sent me to try out and give them my opinion on, and I dearly loved it. It was honestly the best foundation I’ve ever used. Well, I got to use it for a few weeks, and then it suddenly disappeared. I looked all over the bathroom for it, even dug through the trash, and it was nowhere to be found.
A while later, my tweezers disappeared. That was very strange because I never leave them sitting out, they’re always in the container I keep stuff like that in when I’m not using them. And then a week or two ago, my acne treatment was nowhere to be found.
I’ve lost several other things in there, including a wide-toothed comb. And I have yet to figure out where they go. There’s a gap between the the end of the counter and the wall where I’ve found some stuff, but none of the stuff I’ve mentioned has turned up there. So there is either a black hole, or we’ve got some very vain ghosts in this house. Whatever it is, I wish it would just stop stealing my stuff already!
Ever since I had Pumpkin, I’ve considered those credit/debit card scanners at the pumps at gas stations among my proverbial best friends. When you’ve got a baby in the car, it’s so much easier to just step out, swipe your card and pump your gas than it is to pump the gas, get the little one out of the carseat, go in and wrestle with your wallet to get the card or money out, and go back out and put the kid back in the carseat.
There was no pay-at-the-pump at my gas station of choice when she was a baby, so unless Hubby was with me, I would usually go to a different station then. They finally put card scanners at my favorite station a couple of years ago, though. And even though Pumpkin is half grown, they are still quite a blessing. If I’m just getting gas, I don’t have to take her in and contend with her running straight for the nachos and dip machine, or the Slushie machine, or any of the other overpriced stuff that’s irresistible to a pre-preteen.
Now if it were only that easy at the grocery store. It would be great if I could just print out a list on their website or something, stick that list and my debit card in a scanner outside, and have someone bring the groceries out and load them. Not only would Pumpkin not be asking for everything she saw, I wouldn’t be able to make any impulse buys, either.
Hubby’s cousin has been staying with us for a few weeks now. He was living with his parents about an hour and a half from here, but came up to try and make some money. The original plan was to help Hubby with his side jobs, but as it turned out, they haven’t been as steady as he thought they were going to be. So he started looking for a job.
One of Hubby’s clients is another cousin, who is a bank vice president. He hadn’t really associated much with that part of the family until the guy called and asked him to do some work for him, but as we’ve found out, he’s a really nice guy. When he found out about the other cousin’s situation, he called him up and asked him to come to the bank and talk to him. He asked him a little about his background and what he liked to do, and loaned him some money to buy some better clothes. The next day, he had a job doing maintenance at a local car wash.
I had no idea there was anybody with that kind of clout, and the willingness to help people, in Hubby’s family. Now I know where to go if I ever decide to go on a finance job search! I hope I don’t ever have to, but at least maybe I’ll have someone to help me out if it does happen.
I am finally, finally, finally caught up on my work. I feel like a giant weight has been lifted off of my chest. If I smoked, I’d probably be handing out cigars right about now. I’m that thrilled.
Hubby has already laid down the law: He says if I don’t take a long weekend this week, he’s disposing of my computer. So I guess I had better follow orders, huh? But then I was planning to do that anyway.
For now I’ve got to work on getting ahead. I’ve got today and tomorrow to get as much as I can done. Maybe I’ll make some headway. The words have been flowing better for the past couple of days, and I would almost just keep on going as long as they keep coming to me. But I know that if I don’t take a break, I’m going to end up in the same boat all over again. And that would be very, very bad. I’ve already decided that if I get as far behind this month as I have been getting, I’m going to go job hunting and give up on writing (at least for now). And I certainly don’t want it to come to that.
Anyway, I just wanted to let those of you who have expressed concern (and by the way, thank you so much) that things are going better now. I’m in a much better frame of mind, and I’m actually feeling fairly optimistic. Here’s hoping that things continue to go well!
