The Bad and the Good

 

Hi!  Yes, I’m still alive.  Getting through as best I can, considering everything being thrown at me.  Life has been very rough these last couple years.  I keep thinking it is going to get better, and in some ways, it has.  In others, though, I don’t like to think about it.  I’ll start with the bad, to get THAT crap over with.  I believe I told everyone about my former employer, the one I absolutely LOVED, going under.  Those who’ve known me a while now, know that is the last two employers who’ve gone under.  Am I killing them?  Who knows?  Heck, for that matter, who cares?  They went under after 118 years of being in business as a major law firm.  My “family” was scattered to the wind.  It felt like a death to me.  Which brings me to THIS year.  It started out, I think, on Easter Sunday.  My one coworker who stuck it out almost to the end with me, even after our manager quit, had a rough Easter Sunday.  She’s 27 years old, has a 5 year old and a 1.5 year old.  She and her husband are the cutesy couple who everyone wishes they could be.  They went to his family’s place for Easter Sunday.  He was outside playing ball with his brothers and family, dove for the ball, hit his head on the pavement, and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.  A young family torn apart on a day which is supposed to be about celebrating!  He was 31.

Jump ahead a few months to August.  Some friends from my home town, he a little older than me, she a year younger.  Their 17 year old son goes to school, happy go lucky kid.  Lives for playing basketball.  He’s walking to the gym to play some basketball with his friends (children of another friend of mine), when he says he doesn’t feel well, and begins to say he’s dizzy, when he falls over.  He never regained consciousness.  I still haven’t heard what caused his way-too-early death.  My entire hometown was rocked with the fact that even healthy young athletic stars can be taken. 

Jump ahead to last Saturday.  My “sisters” have a brother in Florida with a wife and son.  Only one son.  Saturday morning around 3:30, that one son, a shining star in every sense of the word, was taken from this world by a brain tumor. 

These three people who I’ll never get to talk to again, were all extremely popular, extremely successful in everything they did.  They all LIT UP THE ROOM when they walked in.  Yet they were the ones taken.  They will  all be missed immensely, and it pains me to know that this can actually happen.

 

I don’t want to talk about or think about all that anymore for right now.  I want to move on to some good things.  (need to, to be honest!)

 

 

 

So after my former employer went under, I took a position with another law firm here in town.  Although I truly do NOT like the position, the firm is not “bad”.  It is nothing near as great as my last firm, though.  But there are good things about this firm and position.  First, I took the shift of Saturday and Sunday, from 2 AM, until 2 PM, and Monday and Tuesday from 7 AM until 2:45 PM.  Although this sounds like a horrible shift, being my entire weekends are gone, I found that it was nice to have Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off!  On those weeks where Monday was a holiday, I only had to take Tuesday, a 6 hour and 45 minute day, in vacation, and I would have 5 days off!  I have grown to REALLY like that!  It assisted me in my Summer months!  I did a “little” bit of traveling this Summer. 

In May, the week of Memorial Day, I drove to Myrtle Beach, SC, and spent 5 days with my Godchildren and their parents.  If you remember, last year I got sick for that trip.  This year I wasn’t so unfortunate, and enjoyed myself immensely!  Relaxing?  Not so much.  Enjoyable?  100%!!!!!

Skip ahead to June.  One of my former coworkers has family in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes”>  She asked me if I would like to go visit them with her.  I had met them a couple times throughout our time working together, so I decided it would be fun!  So I spent 3 days in Rehoboth Beach with her and her family.  That was nice!  Even though it rained most of the time I was there, it was very relaxing!

Last year when I went to my parents’ place, I was extremely stressed and depressed as well.  I did not go “visiting” anyone.  So this year, when I was coming out of my depression, I asked my mother what would be the best time to come home.  She said the county fair is a joke anymore, so she thought the Historical Society’s celebration, a Threshing Bee (yes, farming community) would be the best time to come, to see the max amount of people I could.  So I decided I was going home for the Threshing Bee!

 

I had joined Facebook earlier in the year, and had been connecting with lots of friends from high school, and my past altogether, so I was enjoying it a lot.  I called my cousin in Oklahoma one day and told her she HAD to get on Facebook, she would LOVE it!  She did, and she did.  She still does!  Anyway, I told her I was going home for the Threshing Bee, and she said “I want to go too!”.  Have you ever truly seen a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger and bigger?  I had started a snowball rolling!  By the time the Threshing Bee came around, every one of my cousins on my father’s side was at my parents’ house.  Even my Aunt from Seattle came, and brought her “new man”.  There were 21 people visiting at Mom and Dad’s house!  They actually turned some friends away who were planning on coming for the Threshing Bee.  I felt kind of bad about that, but MAN WAS IT FUN!  I actually flew to Tulsa, OK, and drove my cousin up, because her husband couldn’t take the time off work.  We had such a good time driving up!  We are the same age, so we popped in a bunch of good music, talked our way through the states, and even sang our way through one!  (no, there will be NO recordings)  LOL  We’ve always been close, but there are times when we don’t see each other for years! We saw each other in ’04 when Gramma passed away, but before that, it had been probably 92 when we actually saw each other last.  We picked up right where we’d left off, and didn’t miss a beat.  None of that awkward, “who are you now” phase.  I loved it, and was so excited for the whole visit, we just hit the ground running!  The entire trip was awesome!  I saw friends I hadn’t seen in years!  Some of them since I’d graduated High School!  I can’t say how much fun I had on that trip, there are no words that could describe it.  Although, the mortality thing sunk in a little when I realized my parents are in their 60’s and 70’s.  That scared the crap out of me!

 

In August, I was supposed to stay home, and my younger brother and his wife and 4 children were supposed to come visit me.  As it turned out, they purchased a big old house earlier in the year, and had to put in all new electrical service, and some other repairs.  So they didn’t think they could afford a long trip like coming to DC would be.  It turned out for the best, because while they were supposed to be down here, my sister in law was FINALLY hired as a teacher, a job she’s been trying for ever since they got married back in… was it 93?  They both went to college for teaching, she went for elementary education, he for secondary education.  He got his job a few years ago, and she was still waiting.  I was so excited when she got it!

 

But since they weren’t coming down, I wondered what I should do!  I decided upon a trip.  For years I’ve been cussing myself out for NOT having visited New England.  So I decided I would take the time, and drive up to see my final four conus states.  I had been to every Conus state in the United States, except for Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Connecticut!  I had also never been to Niagara Falls, so I threw that in there just because!  I drove up to Niagara Falls one day, visited the Falls the next, and drove to Vermont.&nbsp; Stayed in Vermont, a small town which I still have no idea how I came across it!  But I went to eat at a place there where the owners’ daughter was the gold medalist at the ’02 Olympics for snowboarding.  It was fun seeing all of the memorabilia.  It was a fun little restaurant with a bar in the back.  It looked like the locals considered it their “Cheers”.  I didn’t really feel “welcome” coming back there when everyone seemed to know each other, so I just ate in the dining room and went back to the hotel.

Next day, I got up and drove through New Hampshire, and on to Ogunquit, Maine.  Ogunquit is SUCH a quaint little town!  But be warned, as I wasn’t!   Ogunquit is a HUGE draw for tourists!  Mostly gay tourists, which is why I discovered it in the first place, but who knew this little town about 7 miles off I95 would be so popular it would take about an hour to get to it from the interstate?  I parked my car when I got there, and didn’t get back in it until I loaded it up to leave.  I walked everywhere in that town, and loved it!  I definitely want to go back there.  and wouldn’t you know my luck?  In a town FULL of gay tourists, the people I meet and hang out with most of the time I’m there is a straight couple from Worcester, MA!!  They were both SO open, so accepting, so loving, I had a hard time understanding it!  But, I made some good friends, and we are now Facebook friends!  J  Oh, and now the only state I HAVEN’T been to is Hawaii, and I am going there to visit Roller Beth next year, with my OK cousin, and hopefully Lilly Lou as well!  We all hung out in High School, so it would be awesome to all be together again!  We’ve even talked about other friends coming out at the same time!  I’m sure it will turn out to be an awesome time!

 

I also found out in August that my loan modification came through for my house, so I will not be losing my house, or I shouldn’t anyway!  It’s been a rough year being in limbo about that, too.  It’s nice to know I don’t have to move, though.  The payment is very manageable, as well! 

 

So yes, I’ve had some really good times this Summer, mixed in with some really bad times.  I’d like for it to settle down and not go from one extreme to the other, though!

 

I’ll try to remember to put some pictures of my trips up here for you all.  Some of them turned out pretty well!