Hmm… Fat Chance?

Adina and I just felt so right together.  We took our vacations together – Seattle, Disneyland, New Orleans, Chicago

One day, Adina told me that she had been promoted within her company and they transferred her to a store in southern California.  I was truly devastated, but I was happy for her.  She was an assistant manager at the store in Sacramento.  The manager that she worked for was unprofessional to say the least.   I knew she needed this promotion, but I hated to lose my roommate.  I knew we would continue to be friends.  The day that she moved, I walked her to her car and cried my eyes out.  She told me she loved me.  We hugged and she moved away.

We stayed in touch, of course, but in the meantime, I’d met a Florida man on World of Warcraft who had been planning to move to Sacramento before we met.  He had friends here, already.   He was a massage therapist and a cook.  I was excited to meet him.  His name was Chance.

It was immediately clear upon his arrival that Chance had misrepresented himself.  He may have been a certified massage therapist, but he wouldn’t get a job as one.  He wouldn’t work as a cook, either.  He was also extremely obese.   I knew he was overweight, but the weight and height he’d given me when he “didn’t have any current full-body pictures,” was off by a LOT.  I don’t mean to sound superficial.  I’m not.  I’m overweight, myself.  But physical attraction is part of the equation and that wasn’t there.  I was still interested in getting to know the man I thought I’d gotten to know online.  But he had been dishonest.  That set an unsettling tone, and I was immediately on my guard.

I had been shopping for a house.  I wanted to be investing my money into something instead of throwing it away on rent.  I found one and was in escrow when Chance arrived.  He moved into Dan’s house with the guys.  By then, they had all realized that Jessica was a shit-stirrer and that most of what they thought they were mad at me for had never happened.

The house I was buying was in a scary part of town, so I wanted a dog.  I contacted an agency that rescued Chows, which is what Magnum was.  They didn’t have any available for adoption, but they put me in contact with a woman who had just contacted them.  She had a chubby long-hair shepherd mix.  We agreed to meet, and I thought the dog, her name was Katie, was a sweetie.  There was another woman there who was considering adopting her.  The woman who had custody of Katy said she would think about it and give us a call with her decision.

That afternoon, I got a call from my realtor that the seller had backed out of our agreement.  So now I had a dog in an apartment.  That did not make me happy.

I called the lady who had Katy and told her that I wouldn’t be able to take her.  The lady told me she’d chosen me and wished I’d change my mind.  She asked if she could bring her by and I said she could.

When they arrived, I let them in.  Then I went and sat on the floor across the room and called Katy.  She walked to me and immediately flopped over into my lap.  She was mine from then on.

I was not thrilled a couple of weeks later when I realized that she wasn’t chubby.  She was pregnant.  She had 7 puppies.  Three of them were stillborn and one died shortly after birth.  The survivors were two boys and a girl.

Chance fell in love with the little girl, so we named her Despereaux after the movie of the same name that we’d just seen.  We decided not to name the other two so that the new owners could name them.  We referred to them as the chunky puppy and the other puppy.

I’d never had puppies before.  I had no idea how to not fall madly in love with them.  By the time they were old enough to be rehomed, there was no way I’d give them up.  The chunky puppy became “Chunk.”  The other puppy, playing on Other Puppy, became Opie (O.P.).  We took them to the dog park as soon as they were big enough for vaccines.  They were celebrities at the dog park.

I finally found a house that I liked, still in a crappy part of town, but it had a huge backyard.  It sat on a quarter acre and it was all behind the house.  We moved the four dogs into the house in the second week of July, 2009.  If you’ve ever bought a house, I don’t have to tell you what a headache it was and what a relief it was when I finally had the keys to move in.

The job that Chance did get, he lost, shortly after starting there.  To my knowledge, he never looked for work again.  Instead, he sat in my house playing World of Warcraft all day.  I would come home and the house would be a shambles.  He would let the dogs run unsupervised throughout the house.  I would find my things all chewed up, including my new prescription glasses.

I was very frustrated, but I felt partially responsible for Chance being in this predicament.  I no longer believed that he had already been planning to move to Sacramento.  He did have a friend who lived in Sacramento.  In any case, I had lost respect for him and I wanted him out of my house.

I had, of course, been communicating with Adina.  She was really unhappy in her new job.  It wasn’t going well.  She worked at a college bookstore and one of the professors on campus had started a campaign of badmouthing her via all-school email because there were issues with getting the textbook in stock.  She forwarded some of the emails to me and I did something I probably shouldn’t have.  I emailed that professor directly.

Dear Dr. Colostomy Bag,

Like anyone and everyone on the college mailing lists, I am now aware of your opinions of the operations of the bookstore and its new management.  Since you are so fond of opinions, let me share with you mine:
You are the most narcissistic, unprofessional, childish excuse for a an educator I have ever heard of.  You are a journalism professor, and yet you broadcast a bias-laden work of fiction about a topic you obviously know nothing about.  
You are a journalist in the same league with Maury Povich and Jerry Springer.  You write to incite irrelevant, emotional responses that require no wit or knowledge to compose.
As a former college student, I’m quite familiar with bookstores running out of text books.  It happens for a multitude of reasons.  Students make it work.  And lets be honest, a large portion of them never read the material anyway.  
As an educator, I would never include my students in my business matters.  It’s unprofessional, and frankly, it makes you look like an arrogant ass.  No rational person will ever respect your methods.
You should be ashamed of yourself.  You turned what could have been a simple business matter into a personal assault.  The subject of your email campaign happens to be a human being — one I happen to know to be an absurdly hard worker, the consummate professional, and a very decent human being.  Think of that the next time you go on one of your diatribes.

Jerk.

Sincerely,
Jenna S. R######

P.S.  You can write back, but it will immediately go to my trash folder.  I don’t read junk mail.

Adina called me in a panic.  She was terrified she’d be fired.  She was panicking that she’d have to move back in with her mother if things didn’t work out down there.   I told her not to worry.  She would always have a home with me.

She sent me a message a few days later.  She got offered a position as manager of the store she’d been working at before she moved down South.  Adina was coming home!

I came home from work one day and the dogs had eaten a brand new pair of heels that I’d been wanting for ages.  I’d finally found them at a factory seconds store and they were marked down to a price I could afford.  Chance was, of course, sitting in front of the computer, raiding in WoW while my dogs ran through the house with no supervision.  I composed myself and calmly told him that I wasn’t happy and this wasn’t working.

He moved out within a week.

Adina moved back in and we lived happily ever after…. until we didn’t.