All kinds of stuff in this one!

Wow, I’ve been busy.

Got back from vacation and wished I’d never gone, or maybe never come back…

Only one of the five positions I had opened get filled even though I had names on the requisitions and all they had to do was interview and pick five good people. So I’m still short-handed.

The daily paperwork was incomplete because the person I spent two or three hours going over it with apparently wasn’t paying attention, so I had to get that caught up since it’s not only the end of the month, it’s the end of the quarter, so everything has to be signed and filed NLT close of business Monday. At least I’m only four days behind now.

There was a bit of a stink going on when I left and of course for some reason that whole investigation just stopped while I was gone, even though I wasn’t the lead on it, I was just taking notes. That got wrapped up, I think, yesterday while I was at a class off-site. Lots of crying and yelling and calls to district and regional HR that merely confirmed the outcome. If grown ups could just not act like teenagers things would go so much more smoothly at work. Seriously.

Had an employee die this past Sunday, which I think has contributed more than anything to my silence here. She’d been in the hospital for a week or so, and at first we all thought it was pneumonia. It turns out she was riddled with cancer, and hadn’t known it. The doctors don’t know how long she’d had it, but by the time it was diagnosed there was nothing anyone could do but make her comfortable. Her husband is just devastated, this is the second time he’s been made a widower. They’d been together for ten or so years, he’s seventy-five and she was eighty-three. I’m not sure he’ll be able to come back to work, but I’ll find him something to do if he wants to. The funeral was today, what a great way to start my shift. Almost half the chapel was filled with co-workers, we got help in from neighboring stores to cover during the funeral. The minister commented that he rarely saw a turnout like this for a morning funeral on a weekday, and it only showed how special she (the deceased) was that she’d touched so many people and made such a difference in out lives.

And it seems that regardless of how the biology works out, I now have a daughter. I just checked and I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the possibility here, so let me ‘splain. Back in the early days of 2006 I started having these weird dreams about a teen-aged girl showing up at my door with a suitcase, asking if I knew a woman named “X”, saying she was my daughter, and by the way I’m pregnant so that’s why mom kicked me out. Of course, after three or four nights of this dream I start to hunt down the only ex I have that has any children, and at the time she was born there was some question in my mind about her oldest daughter, but I was told repeatedly I was not the father. I was only eighteen and not too insistent, not wanting to explain to the family how the “good” grandson/nephew/cousin managed to end up a dad without being married you see. So anyway, I found her, we chatted around for a day or to on AIM and then I just asked her, told her about the dreams, and she again said no, I’m not the father. Several weeks later, again on AIM, she mentions that JB (the girl) is pregnant and did she mention that? Again, I remind her about the dreams, is she sure, etc. and now I’m told JB is “probably not” my daughter. Dammit. Anyway, I told my ex if she wanted a DNA test done I’d pay for it, I wasn’t going to interfere or anything, and there wasn’t going to be a Darth Vader “no JB, *I* am your father” moment. She laughed, told her she’d talked to JB, we could do the test if I wanted to, and they were all fine with it.

We never did the test.

My ex and I chatted occasionally on AIM and exchanged e-mails. JB had a healthy son, and life moved on. JB got pregnant again, by a different guy, I expressed concern, asked about her every once in a while, and she had another son that my ex took to raise since the circumstances surrounding the conception were not exactly pleasant and JB wanted little to do with him. They moved up north, JB found me on MySpace and jokingly called me “Dad” in her friend request, so of course I added her. She since moved up north, gotten married and had a third child, an adorable little girl. She’s been having problems with her husband, and I’ve been checking on her pretty regularly. She told me this must be what it’s like to actually have a dad. It seems I’ve kept in touch more and shown more concern over the past year than the man whose name is on her birth certificate has in the past decade. She told me, after first saying she hoped she wasn’t going to freak me out, that she really thought of me like a dad, loved me that way too, and really wanted to meet face to face some day. I told her I loved her too and I’d try to arrange something as soon as I can, but she lives much closer to Canada than the Appalachians so it’s going to take some doing.

At any rate, regardless of the biology, it seems I’ve acquired a daughter. She turns twenty in September, I hope to be able to visit by then, but again, massive distances involved and very little free money in my pocket. But now I kind of feel bad that I wasn’t there to help raise her, and maybe point her down a different path than the one she’s taken. Not sure if there’s anything I can do though…