Wordless Wednesdays

Looking Like a Tramp, Like a Video Vamp

So, I have really big news... HUGE NEWS... but it will come at the end of this blog because I just had the most mindblowing conversation with a friend. I learned something I didn't ever think was even possible and to be perfectly honest, it's completely blown my mind. I am flabbergasted, to say the least.

I am friends with a girl who has never heard the song Pour Some Sugar on Me by Def Leppard.

Take a moment and let that sink in.

HOW is that even possible? I mean, I don't know about your guys' parts of the country, but on a Saturday night if I'm out at the bar, THIS is the song that gets the Cougars out on the dancefloor! EVERY TIME.

It's a good thing she has me for a friend, and that I was able to direct her to the Def Leppard/Taylor Swift version of the song. It's the least I could do.

Speaking of music... I've got pretty random tastes, and yes, I'll admit to certain things like seeing Hilary Duff in concert three years ago, and singing along with Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA" every time it comes on the radio.. but I've had this song stuck in my head for weeks now and I absolutely love it. Such a happy, makes you wanna get up and dance type song...





Just hearing this I want to slip into a bikini, grab a fruity drink and dance on the beach. Just saying.

Okay.. so my BIG NEWS...

I HAVE A NEW JOB!!!!!!!!

I can't say much yet, because well, I haven't started yet, and I haven't given my notice at my current job yet, but I interviewed yesterday and again this morning and at 4:30 this afternoon, they called and offered me the position! And I start on Monday. I will train at the new job Monday through Wednesday, and then work the current job Thurs-Sun... I'm giving my two week notice tomorrow, and I'm thinking I'll just use up my vacation days for the final days so I can be done sooner.

You guys, I am so incredibly happy to be leaving that job I can't even put it into words. I need this, I need the change, and the position I am moving to is absolutely wonderful, and gives me a chance to make a difference in people's lives.

Yay me!

I Am Never Moving Again... For 12 Months

Full disclosure: I'm writing this at work on Sunday afternoon, and they are playing an all-weekend marathon of Christmas music. Why yes, I am enjoying some hot chocolate and singing "Sleigh Ride" while staring out the window at the lovely orange and red fall foliage. And I'm completely okay with that. But now I want to watch Home Alone.

I moved into my new place just over a week ago and am almost completely settled in. Yay me! The move itself was of course riddled with tiny yet super-stressful setbacks that made the process not-so-fun. Oh, the joys of moving!

I was supposed to be out of the old place by the 15th, so I was all set to move everything on the 14th. Even though it was the middle of the week, these days worked pretty well for me since they're the days I have off from work. By the morning of the 14th, I had everything packed up except the kitchen. What is it about boxing up a kitchen that just so completely sucks?

Oh yeah. That.

And that.


And those.




My moving drama actually started the day before though, on the 13th. You see, I had it all planned, and was set with 3 guys and 2 of their trucks to help me move - awesome! This was going to be a really quick move with me doing very minimal heavy lifting!

Yeah, not so much. On the 13th, I texted one of the guys to confirm the times we set up for the following day, and I get this text back.

"Oh crap. Oh man, I'm so sorry! You see, we were all drinking last night, and well... we're on a road trip. To Houston."

Well isn't that just great? Now, I'm all for drunken impromptu road trips but not when they strand me helpless!

Immediately, I went to facebook to broadcast my problem. Within in an hour I had the husband of a friend ready to help me.

Crisis One averted. I was able to sleep easily that night.

So now it's moving day, and I'm awake at 8 am, determined to have the kitchen packed up before we start moving stuff over at noon, which is when he's supposed to show up with the truck and start moving furniture.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

11:45, I get a text messaging asking if we're still on for moving today. Um, yes. Okay great, he should have the truck in the next hour and should be there by 1:30. Cool, I can handle this. I load my car up with as many boxes as I can cram into it. May as well, right?

2:30, I sent a slightly concerned, but still polite text along the lines of, um, where are you? Oh, he just got the truck, and he has to clean it out and he and his friend should be there within the hour. Right. Well, while I'm waiting, I'm going to just go take this carload of boxes to the apartment and will meet you back here. Sure great, we'll have started loading the truck by then.

3:30, Back at the house and there's no truck. No answer to my text messages either. Concern becomes panic, and I start texting other friends (Sorry Amanda!) and bitching and complaining about how my stuff is never getting moved. In the meantime, the cable/Internet people call me and are all, "where are you, we're here to set up your service."

Oh hell no! My installation was scheduled a week prior, and for the very specific hours of between 5 and 7 pm, with the phone people coming the following morning. Now, this is a future post, but I do not do well with service calls. Ever. And I feel bad for any service rep who gets me on the phone if I've not had a good experience with their people. So when the guy tells me he's there now and if I'm not there in 10 minutes, they're going to reschedule my installation and it will be the following week, I lost it. I packed the car up again with a million boxes and headed back to the new apartment, because let's face it - a girl needs her Internet and cable when she's all along in a new place for the first night!

So the installation gets done, I unpack my second round of stuff, and get back to my house at 445 and guess what? THERE'S STILL NO ONE THERE! So I did what I had to do.

I texted my friend's wife. Oh yeah, I went there. He wasn't answering my texts so I went to the wife and made her track him down.

5:30, Still no one at my house, and now I'm in the predicament where everything I own EXCEPT the furniture is at the new place, and the furniture is at the old place, so if no one shows up at all, I can't really stay at either! So I begin making new plans, and enlist another friend to come help me out. (Thanks, M & B!)

6:15, Naturally the minute I finalize plans with the second round of friends, this guy shows up. Sigh. I call my other friends back and call them off, but thank them profusely, but you know what? Its now SIX HOURS AFTER I was supposed to have been moving stuff, and I'm done being grateful for a friend's help and more pissed off than anything. Because now, it's dark outside, and the temperature is dropping into the 40s. And I haven't eaten anything all day because I assumed we'd be moving stuff at noon and then was waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for this guy to show up so I didn't dare leave for food.

Yeah, I was kind of cranky.

By 10:30, we finally have everything moved into the new place and I know that I should be grateful, I should be thrilled and happy that I had the help. Unfortunately, all I can think of is that it took us 4 hours to move everything, and if we had started at NOON like I wanted, we would have been done by 4, I would have already eaten, and could be sitting in my new living room watching Law and Order: SVU.

I really am ungrateful sometimes. I need to work on that.

11:30, I've eaten, the cats are adjusting, and while I can't figure out how to set my bed up, I've at least made the bed so I have sheets and blankets and pillows to sleep on, and oh-my-god does my entire body ache from carrying 50 million boxes of crap up one flight of stairs (I need to exercise more) and all I want to do is go to bed but I all I can see is this.


And this.


So you know what I did? I turned the lights off, ignored the mess, and dropped into bed.

You would have done the same. And if you wouldn't have, then I'm calling you for my next move.
Thursday rolls around, and its not so bad. I get the last two car loads of crap out of my old house, get things squared away with the landlord and I was free!!! Too bad I had to go straight to work for an 8 hour shift then. Oh yeah, work sucked. I was sore, and I was freezing cold from being out in the rain and 40 degree temps for two days and I was exhausted and stressed that my new place was a wreck and yeah, I just wanted to go home.

Oh, there's another story about my phone installation and how that got jacked up, and it carries over from Thursday to Friday, but like I said, that's another post. :)

Needless to say, I'm up at 8 am Friday morning because the phone people are coming. Nevermind that I got home from work Thursday night at 12:30 and HAD to watch the new Grey's Anatomy before going to bed. I'm a little upset when the phone guy doesn't show up until 10:45 am. Oh yeah. But I didn't stay mad for too long, because it was Friday and that meant my Mom, my sister, and my Grandma were on their way to come see me!

Because, you see, even though I am almost 29 years old, my Mom still feels like she has to come and unpack my things and set my apartment up. Hey, I'm not stupid enough to complain about that! Plus, I had the night off from work, so that made things even happier.

My sister and mom were staying at my place for the weekend, so we got back around 9 that night and right away, my mom starts unpacking things. And dude, she went right for the kitchen. Seriously, first thing she attacked was the last thing I wanted to do! So, she banished me from the room, and within an hour she had turned that mess in the picture above to this.

Me? I was a happy girl.

Even better? I went to work Saturday morning with nothing else done, and came back Sunday night to find this.

And this.

Seriously? Best. Mom. Ever. God, I love her.

So, spurred on by my mom's awesomeness, Saturday night I unpacked all of my clothes, all of my bathroom stuff, and all the other little stuff. The only thing left for me to do is to finish up my second bedroom slash office. The bedroom part is set up, but I haven't unpacked the office type stuff yet... or my books! My bookshelves are lonely! But I didn't have much motivation for it last week, and it wasn't really necessary for living, and so... it will get done this week.

So my feelings on the new apartment thus far? I'm happy with it. It's home... my things, my signature room scents (they're very specific for different rooms because I'm weird like that), and the cats have adjusted well enough that they don't freak out over every little sound. I'm confident this was a wise move for me... already, my stress levels are way down, and I haven't had an anxiety attack yet, so hey... bonus!


Also? Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas is You still makes me unbelievably happy.

Gutted No More

We've all seen the movie Sex and the City... and if you're like me, you've seen it about 2,000 times. And if you're really like me, you get choked up during the New Year's Eve scene because that version of Auld Lang Syne is absolutely breathtaking.

The other scene in that movie that absolutely gets to me? When the girls get to Mexico, and after letting Carrie sleep the first two days away, Samantha finally makes her sit up and have breakfast. Every time I see it, tears well up because dude? I've been there.

In those scenes where Carrie's in bed, and when Samantha is spoon-feeding her... Sarah Jessica Parker just looks so devastatingly gutted... and it just... it reminds me of when I wasn't getting out of bed, when I really didn't want to do anything but sleep and forget everything that was going on around me.

So why bring this up now? Partly because I watched the movie again last night (thanks, OnDemand!) and partly because this entire week, I've barely left my bed.

At first I thought it was H1N2, because I'm paranoid like that. I didn't feel very well at work on Sunday, and when I got home, I crawled into bed at 9 that night to watch Desperate Housewives and ended up falling asleep and not waking up again until almost 10 the next morning. That's a lot of sleep. The same thing happened Tuesday, I just could not stay awake! I stayed in bed, getting up only to feed the cats, shower, change into new pajamas, and to make tea. I slept a good 16 hours that day. Wednesday, I slept probably 12 or 13.

And while I'm not sick, I still don't feel right. Now, it's most likely because in the last two weeks I have made some huge life changing decisions.... changes that should be made one at a time, not all at once, and some of them I can't talk about yet, but there are a lot of balls hanging in the air, and sooner or later, they're all going to drop and I need to be prepared for that.

The main reason I'm bringing this all up now? The reason I'm comparing myself to the absolute worst SJP looked in the entire movie instead of one of the brighter, more fabulous moments?

Because I refuse to feel this way anymore. I refuse to let that gutted, hopeless feeling take over my life. I can overcome this, I can look past the few bad points that are left and I can concentrate on the positive and the good... because really, I have so much going on, and so many people in my life to be thankful and grateful for.

So all the despair and depression and regret that continue to nag at me... I'm done with it. I will not let it beat me again. It can't beat me again.

Starting today, I'm working my way back to happy.

Why Yes, I Am a Blonde!

Before I get into this ~ Are any of you watching Dancing with the Stars? And if so, are you seriously still confused because there are WAY TOO MANY freaking dancers? I'm looking forward to their only being 10!

Now onto the post.

On Sundays, I work a lovely shift of 8 am until 8 pm. There is one co-worker there with me for the same shift. Normally, we function pretty well, we get our crap done, and we play practical jokes on the day crew.

FYI: Using fishing line to tie every single item on someone desk to their chair, so that when they pull their chair out Monday morning and EVERYTHING comes flying off the desk? Awesome. Simply Awesome.

Anywho.

So we're at work this past Sunday, and he's got this stack of bill of ladings that we need to fax to a customer. We meander into the copy/fax/supply room and we stand there and stare at the biggest fax/copy/scanning machine ever. This thing is like, 6 feet long and 3 feet high. It's huge. It's also from like, 1995 and so as you can imagine, definitely outdated.

We've decided not to fax these stupid bills, because there are seriously like 75 of them, and there's no way our fax machine could handle that without an Office Space moment. Instead, we decided to scan and email them. Much easier.

Or so we thought.

So we're standing there in front of this monster of a machine, and it has a really nifty touch screen on it. And so we turn it on, and we enter in the correct email address that we are sending these too, and then we feed all 75 pages through the scanner in like, 10 seconds. And we see on the touch screen at the very bottom that it says "copy/printer is warming up"

And so we wait.

And we wait.

By this time, I'm looking through the drawers and shelves to see what kind of office supplies I can steal.

We wait some more.

He sings a song. "Be Our Guest" from Beauty and the Beast if you wanted to know.

We both look back at the touch screen monitor - it still says warming up. But then I notice something else. I walk closer.

I push the big green "Start" button.

Mission accomplished.

Oops.

An Update

So.

Last week Tuesday, I woke up mid-morning, and within an hour of being awake decided that I was going to take a trip up to my parents' house. It's not a quick drive, my parents live almost 5 hours away. I packed my bags and called my mom, letting her know I'd be home in time for dinner.

As I drove, I wasn't quite sure what all, if anything, I was going to say to my mom, but I knew just being in the same environment for awhile would be some help. The drive itself was rather soothing actually... just me and a collection of Journey and Fleetwood Mac cds. Oh, and in case you're wondering, in the span of two and a half hours of just radio, I heard Miley Cyrus's song "Party in the USA" at least 7 times. And now, a week later, it is still stuck in my head.

So what did I end up telling my mom? Honestly, not that much. But just being home, I was able to make a few decisions that I was struggling with, and well... there are some big changes heading my way once again.

The biggest change? I'm moving. Again. You may recall, it's only been 7 months since the last time I moved. It sucks, but there are quite a few issues between my landlord, his family, and myself, and really, it's just easier if I move. I'm moving to an apartment complex (yuck) about 10 miles south of where I live now so it's not a big move, but its a move nonetheless.

The upside? I'll be saving a lot of money with the move. Enough to where I'll be able to have old debts paid off by the end of this year, and will begin to start building up my savings again at the start of the new year. If all goes well, by the time this new lease is up, I should have a considerable amount saved up for a down payment on my own house.

Because, let's face it. I'm 3 months away from being 29 years old, and nowhere near getting married and settled so I may as well start making a life for myself while I wait for that to happen.

So yeah, another move. I'm excited but moving is always a pain in the ass.

What else? I've been interviewing like crazy, so hopefully I will be out of that whole situation very very soon. That's more exciting that anything else.

As for all of my other issues? They're still going on, but I've been managing them better. I know there are certain things I can control, and some that I cannot. I am doing better at getting under a sleeping schedule and that alone is helping a lot. I do still need to see a doctor, but I am waiting until I can get the insurance situation under control.

Are things perfect? Of course not, I know better than to expect everything to be sunshine and roses right away, but I can honestly say things are looking up. Getting away from everything, even for just a couple of days, and making the few changes I have made are getting me back on the right track.

And for that, I'm extremely grateful.