Did you ever notice that after a really hard cry, all it leaves you with is an exhausted heart and a headache from hell? Furthermore, did you also notice that no medicine in the world can take away that kind of headache?
Maybe that’s what someone should invent. Specifically a “Post-Tears Headache medicine,” but with a better name. Help me out here. “No more tears, your headache’s gone?” Suggestions?
You may recall that I put an offer on a house some time around the beginning of June and you may be asking if I love my new place, did i find a roommate, congratulations, or any other questions and/or platitudes you would send my way.
You know what I would answer? I don’t have my fucking house yet.
Can I tell you how frustrated I am? Can I tell you that even though I’ve tried to keep a positive attitude and enjoy the fact I’m saving money every day this is postponed, I still can’t stop the screaming inside my head?
I realized today (actually it’s been a gradual acceptance) that I am more depressed over this whole house thing that I thought I was. I want so badly to be in my house, but all this waiting and not knowing is killing me. We were supposed to close on August 19th, which already felt like forever because it was over two months after the day we made the offer. But the builders are slow, irresponsible, finger pointing, blame shifting, incompetent asses who are dangling my unfinished house in my face like a two year old and then running off squealing with delight while I cry.
I have been eating non-stop, gained 14 pounds in 7 weeks, my body hurts, I have nightmares every night, and I’m fighting more with everyone because I’m so fucking sick of waiting. My room is a mess because I thought I’d be moving soon so I figured I’d just pack it up instead of clean it up (it’s been months). My health has deteriorated because I planned on all sorts of “taking care of me” stuff when I moved in to my own place. I bought a couch, where you pick out the fabric and they have to send away for it and it takes forever, but I timed the delivery perfectly with the second or maybe it was third predicted closing date and the couch is ready and I’m being charged every day I make them hold onto it while I wait for my motherfucking house.
I leave for Spokane for nine weeks on Sunday. I close on the house the following Friday (don’t even get me started on how messy this has gotten with me being out of town at this time). I arranged to come home the day after I close so I can move all my stuff out of my sister’s place into mine and then fly back to Spokane, leaving my house messy and unoccupied. It breaks my heart, but that’s my plan.
Then today I get a call that we may not close on the 23rd. “The paving may not be done. We just don’t know. Definitely by the end of the month, but can’t be sure.” Fuck my ass. This is absurd.
All I want to do is cry, which is getting in the way of the telekinetic killing power I’m trying to strike down upon them. Shoot me now. No more putting on my happy face. I’ve cracked.
At work we have a web blocker so that we can’t view things like game sites, porn, videos, etc. Understandable, although I get annoyed on the video part since sometimes it may be a video I actually want to watch for work (i.e. medical video for educational content). Okay, maybe I’m full of shit on that one, but the possibility is there.
Today with a little extra time on my hands after having a heated discussion at work with some Psychiatrists about how they think Tom Cruise is acting Manic (in the clinical sense), I decided to peruse the web for scientology.
Guess what? Our web blocker, WebWasher, doesn’t think it’s apppropriate for me to go to the Official Church of Scientology site. But I had no problem going to the Catholic websites. Hmm… I don’t know whether I’m furious at the selective blocking or secretly pleased that it had the good sense to treat the Scientology site like Entertainment/multimedia/porn/garbage.
Okay okay. Quick blog. I promise I’ll do better, but my hours are long at work and my commute is sucking up my energy. Therefore, I come home, I sleep.
Something Funny.
I’m working in the Behavioral Health department right now, assisting Psychiatrists with the computer. One of the things we help them do is create a quick link to common notes they may make on patients. Sometimes other docs will write up some great notes that can be used as a template for other docs and I like to search through them occasionally looking for gems I can pass around.
My favorite discovery so far? “Mother is encouraged to watch SuperNanny to learn good parenting techniques.” That’s pretty cute.
Something Scary.
Tonight I went out with some good friends (Tonja, Joey Joe Joe, Chris, Johnny, Kat) and while sitting in The Honey Hole I saw a strange looking truck drive by. It was a big truck, but with a very tall skinny trailer part to it. I pointed it out and discovered it is simply a mobile billboard. I am APPALLED. Billboards are not enough visual pollution, now we have to add some air pollution as well by driving them around on a big gas-guzzling semi? Sick.
As I mentioned on The Book of Drivel, I did away with my Dish Network. Which doesn’t just mean I cancelled the dish and switched to something else. It means, I cancelled cable altogether. All I have now is DVD’s and Videos if I want to watch something.
So let’s first look at the process of getting rid of it and then we’ll discuss further the why and now what of the situation. I called Dish Network and told them I wanted to cancel my service when the month I had already paid for ended. They asked me assorted questions such as, “Why are canceling? Can we offer you a better package? If this is about money, can we give you a smaller package?” To which I responded with, “I want to save money, sure, but mostly I just don’t want TV anymore.” The woman on the phone didn’t seem to understand this concept.
Good. Done. That was a month ago. So Thursday was the big day. I have been really excited for this day to come. Dreaming about all the reading and blogging and socializing and cleaning I could get done if I just didn’t have TV. (Sidenote: a friend said, why don’t you just unplug it while you are waiting for it to go off. Whatever. I don’t have that kind of self-control and I want to get my money’s worth. Which subsequently sparked this marathon of TV watching on my part. Especially since I needed to get through all my TIVO’d stuff.)
So Thursday morning I get a phone call. Guess who. Dish Network.
Jesus Christ, people. Seriously. I told her it was an addiction and she kept pushing it. I was actually starting to get angry because I was thinking of America in general and the pressure she was putting on, a somewhat strong-minded, stick-to-my-guns kind of person. I do think TV is an addiction, just like porn or cutting yourself. Am I wrong?
So, here we are. My first weekend without TV. You wanna know what I’ve done this morning? I’ve been going through my DVD’s and finding all the Hidden Features. (Baby steps, people, baby steps). My good friend Dave taught me about Easter Eggs. You go to the Main Menu of a DVD and with a certain up or down or over of the arrow you can sometimes find extra treats. For example, on the move Saved! there is a hidden feature of Michael Stipe doing a interview where he offers a limited opportunity to get saved. Pretty cute.
So go check out the webpage linked above and it will tell you where there are Easter Eggs on your movies. How fun.
And so begins my life without Cable and perhaps more blogging.
As some of you may have surmised, my birthday was Monday, Groundhog’s Day. On Sunday night, I had a great dinner at St. Cloud in Madrona with Scott, Tonja, Piet, and my sisters. Despite a few sisterly tiffs, it went fairly well and the waiter even sang Happy Birthday to me in a shockingly amazing voice. Thanks Aaron the waiter!
On Monday, my actual birthday, I was stuck in a new employee orientation all day in Tukwila. But my day was brightened by numerous text messages and voice mails wishing me a happy birthday. As well as a cute pic message from Johnny to my phone. Thank you everyone who remembered. I was amazed by the outpouring of kind thoughts and it made my day a little better. Unfortunately I had an exam and project due on Tuesday so after my work day I went into the office until 10:30pm and worked on my project.
Another thing, which seems to happen often on my birthday, is that I was sick. Still am a bit. I think I got my bad cold from Tonja because I didn’t give her much sympathy when she said she was sick and I even said, “I never get sick, let’s go hang out.” So there I was on my birthday feeling crappy and working all day. Then on Tuesday I took my exam and felt sicker, and then came Wednesday when, after popping some vitamins before training, I found myself in the bathroom hovering over the toilet with dry heaves. Needless to say, my teacher sent me home and, much like my brother the groundhog, I frowned at the shadow of my birthday and climbed back into bed.
The only thing that made it better (besides everyone’s birthday messages) was the fact that accompanying a great gift from my mom of a gift certificate for a cooking class, she also sent me my teddy bear, LizBear, who I had left in Oak Harbor. So there I was, curled up in bed with LizBear, and I was glad to have her back. 28 years together and sometimes I think she’s holding up better than I am.
Seattle, WA
Well, it’s official. I am living and working in Seattle. You know how I know? Because I had to brave the horrid commute to work, through some horrendous traffic. People always said that Seattle was ranked high on the bad traffic scale, but I always brushed it off as an exaggeration. In all my time here I have only had to take back roads to get to work and usually not during the usual rush hour times.
But not anymore. Living in Ballard and having to go south of Boeing field this morning was not a fun drive. It took over an hour and there were two accidents in my way. One in Ballard where a guy was hit by a car and then dragged. Another on I-5 of course. And now that I sit in my sister’s Capitol Hill apartment because I still don’t have a phone line or internet connection at my place, I can see another accident happening on I-5. I guess I’ll be putting off that commute back to Ballard for now.
I start my training for the new job tomorrow. Today was just orientation and if you want details you have to talk to me yourself, but it’s not very interesting. I’m excited to learn the new computer system though and it looks like I might be on a former co-workers team, unless they decide to switch it. Hopefully not.
I know this is a terribly boring and anti-climactic blog entry considering the length of time you had to wait for me to finally blog, but I’m exhausted. I’ve been packing, moving, painting, packing, moving, cleaning, unpacking, etc. for the last month and I’m tired.
Oak Harbor, WA
Sunday I had a blast at the Seahawks game and want to tell you all the gory details of it, but I’ll just direct you to Johnny’s post. I think I’m going to buy season tickets next year, so everyone better be extra nice to me. But alas, after an amazing weekend with Johnny and the gang, I’m back with the parents, packing boxes again and trying to give attention to their dog Dakota. Is it just me or do dogs always act as if you have never given them any attention in their entire existence. Whenever you pet them or come near them, they act as if they haven’t seen you in years. Then five minutes later, you come by again and sure enough, “pant, pant, lick, lick, thank you so much for giving me attention again, you’ve been neglecting me.” Sort of like men.
But my cats on the other hand, I have to hunt down and practically beg them to cuddle with me. The best way to do this is to make it seem like their idea. “Oh I just happen to be sitting on the couch, of course you can sit on my lap.” Cats are just like women. The bad side of this is that I find myself sitting on the couch a lot and trying to send mental messages to my cat, “doesn’t my lap look nice? Don’t you want to be pet?” Takes away from the packing time. Another sure fire way to get attention from the cats is to start blogging or reading. Then they decide the keyboard is just where they want to sleep or the book is the perfect scratching implement. So be it.
But my real reason for posting was to complain about the fact that not only have the cable prices gone way up (argh) forcing me to consider no cable or TIVO instead, but at my parents house, right when I’m getting hooked on a VH1 special on the richest, prettiest, sexiest, most scandalous such and such, it switches to Comedy Central. So it’s VH1 during the day and Comedy Central after about 3pm. What’s up with that? I want both!!! Does this happen anywhere else other than Oak Harbor? Stupid backwards Dutch town.
Salinas, CA
If you hadn’t noticed, my blog was down for the last three days. Ipowerweb somehow had a glitch in the domain name renewal when I extended my time with them. At first I thought, well this is just going to have to be a little hiatus for my blog (which is unfortunate because I had so much to blog) but then I realized that I couldn’t get e-mail either.
So this is to publicly apologize to anyone who thinks I’ve been ignoring their e-mails. I will be sitting down today and going through each of them.
It’s amazing how lost you feel when you don’t have your two links to friends and family: blog and e-mail. What’s that you say? A Phone? I don’t think I’ve heard of this contraption you speak of. I’ll have to look into that.
So my Labor Day weekend would have been wonderful since I got to see my good friend Johnny (read his account of our glorious fun) but instead the gods decided to once again balance out my good fortune with some bad. My computer crashed.
I spent all day yesterday trying to troubleshoot the error messages. You know the ones. A BSoD (blue screen of death) with numbers like 0x000000C2 or 0x000000A5 and of course everything I read doesn’t really help. Every time I thought I had fixed the problem there seemed to be a new error message or number. I won’t bother you with the details, but after shedding some tears in a Best Buy yesterday because they refused to let me exchange the wrong memory card (which they finally did exchange by the way, just to try and get this crazy woman…namely me…to stop crying) and then being on the phone all day today with Dell, I finally got to the point where they said it was the motherboard. Then after another hour of waiting to be connected to the guy who was supposed to set up a time to come out and change my motherboard, I finally talked to Kurt.
Kurt has renewed my faith in Dell. Before I talked to him I had decided (and will actually probably stick to this) that I will never let another friend buy Dell. Horrible tech support. Non-communicative. I could really go into it, but I won’t. But Kurt, wonderful, beautiful Kurt, listened to me. Really listened to me. He asked the right questions, he explained why he was having me try a few more things, he described what he was looking for, and within 15 minutes he figured out it was the original memory card that was bad. Not the ones I had been buying. Now my computer works again and they are sending me a free memory card. Thank god.
So I ask again, was this to balance out the spectacular days I had on Thursday and Friday? I was on such a high and then this happened and I haven’t cried so much in one day for a very long time. (There was more to cry over than just my computer, but I’m sure I would have been more apt to yell instead of cry if it were just that.)
But as I’m writing this I’m looking over into my sister’s kitchen (my sister who’s couch I’m sleeping on) and I see this glass on the floor in the corner. A glass that has been there for about three weeks or more. Underneath this glass that is turned upside down, is a spider. A big scary spider that my butch lesbian ex-army combat helicopter pilot sister was too scared to deal with. And so am I. We are so pathetically afraid of spiders that we have trapped this poor thing for almost a month and neither of us want to acknowledge it’s still there. So maybe it’s karma. Maybe my lack of compassion for this spider is what led to my computer crashing. Hmmm… Our mom was here last night and she always took care of spiders for us when we were little (never forgetting to include a “I can’t believe you girls are such wimps” kind of mumble under her breath) so we asked her if she would take care of it since she was here. She just looked at us like we had to be kidding.
Alas, the spider is still here and my mother won’t take care of it, probably as some statement about us being adults now or something. Do you think I could ask the Dell Tech Support guy to take care of it? I’m starting to feel guilty.
