so what if it's Friday... I'm still Grateful

So I missed Thursday. I'm not sure where it went. I'm sure it existed, at some point in some place, because sure enough it's Friday now and not perpetually Wednesday. But I don't remember it passing-- it must have whizzed by me like an 8-year-old boy on a ten speed bike on a sunny April afternoon.

Yes, here we are at Friday. I woke up in a very grateful mood. First thought that crossed my mind as my eyes opened to face my ceiling and my spinning fan? Friday.... It's gone pretty swiftly downhill since then. I couldn't make up my mind what to take for lunch and was a bit late for work. Emily has been depressing all day. She even slammed her phone down at one point. Usually this kind of thing wouldn't bother me, but she's directly across the hall from me, so I see her and her poutyness every time I glance up from this screen.

She left early. I told her to go home. We're going to get margaritas tomorrow night probably, and she'll be back to her old self. She just needed a break. I emailed Gary and told him if they didn't work out their communication issues I was going to kill both of them. Strangulation, in case he was interested.

But anyway...

1) Friday...

2) A response to my email to Gary, already. Wasn't what I wanted him to say, but at least it was a response.

3) I don't have to think about work for two days. I don't have to think about anything for two days. I have no plans and I love that I have no plans.

4) Rain, to wash away the pollen, grow my vegetables, make my flowers stand tall, and make the earth greener.

5) My birthday coming up next week and people to celebrate with. In sharp contrast to last year, when everyone was too busy, this year we had to make reservations for 12, and at one of my favorite restaurants on their tapas night, no less. It makes me feel very, very blessed.

stuck in the middle

You all are such good advice-givers, I thought I'd run another one by you. There's also an update on yesterday's situation at the bottom.

There's a lot of back story here I could get into, but I won't. I'll sum it up: Gary, my boss, hired his best friend (and now my friend) Emily, as his second employee to help him run his business two years ago. I was next about 3 months later, a stranger to both of them, but now a friend as well. They never learned how to communicate as anything other than friends, which at first was fine, but now that there are close to 20 of us in the office, and stress has been through the roof lately, it causes problems. And I'm smack-dab in the middle of them, both as HR and as their mutual friend.

Emily says Gary takes her for granted, and Gary says Emily doesn't follow all the steps and rules that she should. Emily thinks Gary doesn't listen to her, doesn't believe her, and dismisses her too often, but Gary thinks that Emily should open her ears and listen to all the instructions and not take everything so personally.

They're both flighty as hell, late everywhere they go, change their plans on the fly, and have a great time together socially. But in the work environment, unless they're creatively problem-solving something together, with no time constraints, or budget for that matter (when does this ever happen? never), they can't seem to communicate.

And I've found myself in the middle. Here's the current problem: Gary needed to go visit a client, and being Gary, he waited til the end of last week to plan the trip for this week. Emily was already at a client's office last week so the plans for this week were made without her input. Gary assumed Emily would go, but she had already made plans for the week including follow-up meetings with the client she was just with and putting together an ad that we need to submit by Friday. So she did not go. There was talk on Monday, just before Gary left, of Emily flying out Wednesday. She agreed to this, but Gary and Emily got in a fight later that day because he promised to help her with a document for a client but ran out of time because of other meetings. Somewhat in retaliation, it seems to Emily, Gary hasn't called Emily since. Gary's assistant sent him an email yesterday to ask what travel plans had been made for Emily but got no response. This morning, Emily texted Gary's partner, Wade, who's with Gary, (why not text Gary himself... well Emily believes she's getting the silent treatment, so she's giving it back) to say "I'm pretty sure I'm not going to the client's office, but some notice would have been nice." She received a text back that said "I'm pretty sure you are going next week." Emily is now up-in-arms thinking that Gary, again, is making travel plans for her without consulting her. And she's still waiting for help on that same document.

I was tired of hearing it, and I needed an answer on something else from Gary as well, so I sent him a pretty stern email about how he needed to make more time for us when he's out of the office because we can't function for long without at least some input. He finally called the office, a little sheepishly, and is being passed around on the phone now. Emily's turn, and she's being pretty short with him. "Yes," "no," and "okays" with small explanations in between. Not rude, but maybe a little curt-- not her normal self. But at least she's getting the answers she needed to her questions. One problem solved.

I have no idea how to get them to better communicate. They're teaching each other how to treat each other, playing "silent treatment" games, like little kids. They went to lunch one day last week to try to hash it out, and they came up with a safe word one is supposed to say to the other if one starts to feel they're slipping back into bad habits. We can see how well that's going.

Most of the time it's ok, there are just flare-ups. It's definitely worse when Gary is gone because his scarce free time is even more hard to get.

Emily and I just made a run to Sonic. A cocktail would have been better, but milkshakes will work in a pinch. She felt better after her call with him-- all she needed were a few answers, and he was nice to her. Simple, but it solved it. I'm still trying to figure out either a) how to get out of the middle without pissing either of them off and still being their friend or b) how to get them to better communicate, which is what I really want because it would improve our company too. Any words of wisdom?

Update on yesterday's post:
I let it go. For now. I'm doing exit interviews next week for all of them, and I plan on bringing up his absences then. He just submitted his self-review form to me and on it it states that he'd like to continue to work for us until he graduates in December... apparently he missed a couple classes that he didn't realize until a couple weeks ago. Bummer for him. So I'm going to have to both let him down easy, as we don't want to keep him on, and try to teach him a lesson at the same time. Fun for me. I'm chalking it up as a learning experience, and that's made me glad for it.

liar, liar...

So I'm 99% sure an employee (an intern) lied to me yesterday.

I'll preface this by saying I don't like this kid, Jim. He showed some promise at first, but after getting to know him, the "I'm a rich guy, I'm awesome, everyone loves me, listen to this awesome story about this time I was so hammered" attitude didn't fade away like I had hoped, and other employees have started to notice it as well. So as soon as his internship is officially over next Friday, we aren't planning on hiring him on full-time, just sending him on his merry way with his (tactful if unenthusiastic) letter of reference.

He's called in either sick or late a few times since he started in February, once I know for a bachelor party in New Orleans that took up more of his weekend than he thought it would, and a couple weeks later for that bachelor's wedding and a long trip back. I chalked it up to inexperience and immaturity, and again since we aren't planning to keep him on, I shrugged my shoulders.

As I posted yesterday, there were baseball games in town all weekend. When leaving the game on Sunday afternoon, on a high from our come-back win, my husband and I were gliding across a field to our car when a few douche-baggy drunk boys about 10 feet in front of us started hooting and hollering. I thought, "Hey, that one douche-bag looks a lot like Jim," and then, after he turned around to yell (and slur) something at a friend, I confirmed that it was him. No big deal, it was Sunday, and I don't really care. He didn't see me, and we went on to our car.

Jim didn't come in for work as usual yesterday morning. I wasn't going to chase him down-- it's his internship after all. I just made a mental note of it and thought about how I could get out of writing him a letter of recommendation at all. At about 4:45 pm he called me and asked if I had gotten his email, which of course I hadn't. After mumbling something about there being something wrong with his email account, he told me he had been in his hometown (about 2 hours away) this weekend as his dad was in the hospital again, and he didn't get back in time for work today.

So I was faced with a dilemma. Confront him right then and there? Or play it off and try to gather more intel? I played it off. After I got off the phone, I called his direct manager to ask him to try to get some information from the other interns. Two of them saw him at a bar on the town square Friday night, but no one knew anything other than that. Turns out, they don't like him much either and aren't social with him.

There's a chance he got called home Sunday night after the game (I saw him about 5 pm). But there's a bigger chance, given his history, that he partied it up a little too hard and needed an excuse. Karma will bite him in the butt, eventually, sure, and I hope it doesn't take his father to the hospital with it. But I'm unsure how to address this with him.

He doesn't work on Tuesdays. Tomorrow I think I'm going to casually ask him about his dad and try to gather when exactly he went to his hometown. If he says "all weekend" or pretty much anything other than "just Sunday night to Monday," I know I'll have him. But what do I do with him when I have him? He still has a project to finish. But I don't abide liars. I'll probably ask him to leave.

What would you do, how would you handle this? How do you handle liars in general?

tossing and turning

Didn't sleep last night. I have vague, hazy memories of waking, rolling over, straightening the pillowcase, pulling up the covers, pushing down the covers, kicking off the covers, retrieving the covers from the floor, and sighing out loud several times throughout the night. Sleep, full sleep, would just never come, like there was a mean-spirited ginger child dangling something I wanted just inside my reach and then snapping it away when I jumped for it, singing "nahna nahna boo boo" the whole time.

Other than last night, I had a good weekend. We had baseball games all weekend, but with the terrible storms that rolled through, Friday night's got delayed until finally it was moved to Saturday. I only stayed out there through the first delay-- after that I left my husband there and went home to my couch. He enjoyed his "guy time." They ended up winning both on Saturday, but they ran really late so we were exhausted.

Ours is similar, but bigger, purple, & a tin roof. And no snow.

Sunday morning we slept late, til 10:30, which may have something to do with my not sleeping last night, but you'd think all the walking I did yesterday would make up for it. At noon we parked at the baseball field, then walked all the way back to the town square for the local Spring arts festival, a good mile. We walked around admiring (and giggling at) the arts and crafts on display, ate some lunch from one of the local restaurant's booths, and listened to one of the bands while we ate. We then bought ourselves a handmade birdhouse, on a six-foot pole, which my husband had to carry all the way back to the car. And halfway there we stopped at a gas station for a bag of ice for our cooler, which I carried. We then had to walk up the hill from the parking lot to the baseball field (not an easy feat-- we are, after all, in the foothills of the Appalachians), and we sat in the sun until 5 pm watching our team squeak by in the 9th to win by one run. I'm still surprised we swept all three games.

My forehead is a little pink, but I learned my lesson last time and bathed in spf 50 before even leaving the car. Husband's nose is pink too, but other than that and some sore butts from sitting on the picnic table all afternoon at the field, we escaped our full weekend unscathed.

I also spent some time on Saturday in my yard taking pictures of Spring. My favorite are my blue-blue irises that remind me of Spring in the garden at my grandparents house as a kid, when I would help them plant or move their bulbs and then cut them to make beautiful bouquets. Purple irises were always my grandmother's favorite.

One of my irises

A poppy, growing on my deck

Our vegetables have also started to sprout, with the beans growing the quickest. They're the bigger ones to the right in the picture below. They've already doubled in size since this picture was taken, and there are twice as many too as more sprouted overnight. The big ones in the back left are my tomato and pepper plants. We're going to eat well this summer. That is if the deer keep away.

the stigma of fat

I am not fat. I'm not even pleasantly plump. I tell myself this, but I don't always believe it. I don't have huge issues with food-- in general I eat what I want when I want it. But just because I eat it doesn't mean I don't feel guilty. It doesn't mean I'm not calculating calories in my head. And it doesn't mean that there aren't days I feel a sheer panic-- that fluttering in my chest, racing negative thoughts, shortness of breath panic-- at the thought that I'm getting older and my metabolism won't be so forgiving anymore and I might get... fat.

I am a woman, therefore I feel these things. Because I am a woman, it's status quo. Why is that ok? Why is that normal? Why is that accepted?

It's a terrible thing; it's miserable to feel like you have to analyze every morsel of food that crosses your lips. But this is the way most women in America, and in the world increasingly, operate on a daily basis. We've made ourselves sick, not only physically, but mentally. Did you know that bulimia has the top mortality rate among mental illnesses?

How we fix this, I don't know. I can't even fix myself, much less a nationwide epidemic. But I do know that girls like the one in this video will continue to suffer and die unless we as a country begin to recognize this as a real issue, a real disease, and work to remove the stigma associated with bulimia and anorexia and with "fat" in general.

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Grateful Thursday snuck up on me

I can't believe it's Thursday already again. This week has gone by so fast.

1) Cooking at home. I haven't been able to cook at home at all this week, not even for lunch to bring to work with me, save one lone pb&j on Monday. Work has kept me very busy. But I'm finally getting to the grocery store tonight. I love to eat out, but there's really nothing better than creating and enjoying your own food.

2) An observant husband. When I got home from work yesterday, apparently I had been riding on almost my rim on my back left tire. Luckily he noticed and got it fixed for me today. There was a screw in it, so they plugged it for me. I also got free new brake pads because the ones they put on a year ago were already cracked and still under warranty. And my oil changed too. So not only is he observant, but he takes care of me too.

3) Water! I've continued to drink 24 oz a day and I swear it makes such a huge difference. (I have to pee a lot too, but I guess I can live with that.)

4) A couple new restaurants in town, one that serves soul/Southern type food-- I've already had their blackbean chipotle burger and their fried catfish-- and a new yogurt place similar to a Pinkberry. I hear you can even put Captain Crunch in your fro-yo. I haven't made it there yet, but my boss has and says it's great.

5) Though I hate it most of the time for how quickly it passes and how it changes my life and my body, I'm thankful for the healing properties time has. It's a bittersweet thankful, though, because along with the healing comes forgetting.

Grateful Thursday, at least in the end

Laying in bed last night, listening to the crackling of my ear plugs slowly expanding in my ear canals, I was thinking about my upcoming birthday. I will be 28 in two weeks from yesterday. When my mother was 28, she had a newborn son, my older brother. By the time she was 30, she had two children-- an infant boy and a newborn me, and was planning a move to DC for a few years. By the time she was 34, she had three kids. I remember about this time of my life, my earliest memories, thinking about how big my parents were, and a few years later about how old they were. I feel like over the last ten years or so, the distance between our ages has shrunk, and I now don't think of them as old at all. But there are still 30 years between, and there always will be.

Over the weekend, I spent some time with my friend, Kelsy, who has a 3-month-old little girl. She really wanted her daughter, couldn't wait to get pregnant and have a child. It's natural to her. My good friends, Tom and Sherri, who have my favorite three-year-old little boy in the world, are a couple years older than me, with about the same age span between them and their son as there is between me and my parents, and they seem like they never gave having children a second thought. It's like when people, normal people, hit a certain age, they suddenly think it's ok, that it's natural, that they should bring another person onto this earth and be fully responsible for how the child turns out, that they know they won't drop it or neglect it or somehow screw it up. That they're ok with the fact their lives as they knew them are over for good. Even happy about that.

So, what's wrong with me, why haven't I had that "click" that changes me into a person who wants kids? I am still a kid. I struggle with this-- is this a good thing, something for which to be grateful? Or am I selling myself short? Denying myself something that would be good for me? Or is what's good for me just living my life with my husband?

I'm trying my hardest not to get pregnant, but also understanding if I do, it's not completely the end of the world. Even though it kind of feels like it would be. When I'm 30 I'll reevaluate. That would time the spacing about the same as it is with my parents and me, so it makes me feel not so behind.

I know I've written about this before, but it was on my mind today, and I needed to get it out. What worries me most is that if I were to get pregnant right now, I'm not sure how my husband would react. When I was younger, I always thought I'd "take care of it" but now that I'm married, have been married for five years, to a man that I know I'll always be with, that option isn't on the table anymore. I don't know if he knows that or not. I suppose I should tell him to be sure. He makes comments sometimes, about how nice it is not to have to worry about kids, etc., and in my head I think "what if? what would he say?" Or what if I change my mind and he doesn't? Lord help us both if that happens.

I started to say that I'm not feeling very grateful today, so maybe I won't make a list, but really it's days like today that I need to list the most. So I will force myself. By #5 my funk will be gone.

1) Tuna salad for lunch. With lots of sweet relish. And sweet corn.

2) Staying on the food theme, the shrimp and grits we made were so good. So good. You can find the recipe here. We are instituting a cooking-date-night, both to give us something else to do together and to try out new recipes without me having to fumble around with them myself. This was our first go, and it was a lot of fun.

3) Apparently food is on my mind... we planted our first plants in our vegetable garden yesterday-- two Better Boy tomato plants, a Roma tomato plant, and a habanero pepper plant. Husband loves peppers and spicy food, so that's totally for him. He'll jar them with vinegar to make himself a pepper sauce. This weekend we're planting the rest from seeds-- sweet corn, carrots, zucchini, squash, cucumber, honeydew, soybeans, and snap beans. As we grow it, we plan to blanch and freeze a lot of it for use later in the year, especially the beans.

4) Emily just made another sale. She's been down the last few days, same as her sales, but she's feeling a lot better now. They paid for a full year up front too.

5) Well, listing my grateful items wasn't helping as much today, so I opened up my chat window with my husband to ask him how he would react if I got pregnant. I had been putting that question off for too long. He said "I'm not going to leave you or anything, but there is a lot of living I would like to do before I give myself up to caring for a child, and I would rather have some sort of plan and some money set up before that happens." Perfectly rational and reasonable, which I should have guessed. He also said that he doesn't like me going through these "what if" games because it just makes me worry, and that I should trust that he's the calm and positive one (he is) and that we'd get through it. Which we would. So I'm ok now.

Going to eat #1 now.

unnecessary drama

People make big deals out of things that are not big deals. My husband has taken this religion thing way too far. I have a coworker who sighs and stomps and mutters under his breath in so-called stressful situations, which, in his life, happen every morning. Just a few minutes ago, another coworker, one of the people he manages, shyly asked him for an explanation, and you would have thought she was asking him to rewrite the dictionary for all the sighing and mumbling he did on the way to her desk. Our admin assistant texted me first thing this morning to let me know her babysitter quit and her husband thought she was the worst mother in the world, so she needed to bring her 3-year-old to work with her.

It's all so unnecessary. I'm not a morning person, either, but I don't snap at coworkers for no reason. A smile goes a long way, even a forced one, and can make even the person forcing it feel better. And an open and honest conversation with someone who has done something you don't like can often lead to discovery of misunderstandings or misconceptions, showing you that there was never anything to get upset about in the first place. Self-awareness is the most important-- I find it's so vital to be aware of every word you speak and glance you give. The ones that cause the most trouble are the ones you say or give without considering the consequences.

It's hard to do, and it's not something I accomplish every day. Just yesterday I pricked Emily's delicate sensitivities (she admits she is too sensitive) by a comment I made about education levels. She never finished her college degree. I meant my comment to be about knowledge levels, as in there are people who know more than all of us about certain things, not about degree levels. After all, a degree is only a piece of paper. Once I explained that, she understood, but it shows that occasionally even someone, like me, who picks her words like rolling each blueberry on the bush between her fingers to see which fall off gracefully and which are still holding on for dear life, can occasionally pluck one a little too soon.

So I'm staying surface today, in a sort of balancing act with all the crazy drama swirling around. I'm making my birthday list, slowly but surely-- close to two weeks til that. I told my husband I want my teeth whitened. I inherited my not-so-pearly-whites, but I'm sure years of Coke for breakfast hasn't helped them. I can't use the over the counter strips. After day 3 my teeth get so sensitive I can't even breathe in cool air without cringing. I'd like to get the zoom whitening done-- even if they get sensitive after that, it will fade after a few days, rather than using the strips for 20 days and having sensitivity problems the whole time. It's expensive, though, so we'll see. I told my mom I want a new pair of Tom's. I've got leftover pizza for lunch (too tired to cook last night, we got a new mattress over the weekend, and while I know I'll love it eventually, it's not my bed yet) and plans for shrimp and grits tonight. If the recipe is any good, I'll post it for you tomorrow.

saying what I need to say

The universe answers our questions before they can even be asked sometimes. I'm in a sticky situation, relating to what I had posted about previously with my brother-in-law (read both here on March 29th and here on April 1st). Janna over at Something She Wrote reminded me of what I already know but what I needed to hear again this morning: just say what you need to say. The problem is I don't really know what I need to say. I know what I feel, but how to translate that into words?

So we finally got to see my brother-in-law last night. I'm pretty sure he was avoiding us, at least in part, because of the change that's occurred in him, but life just gets busy sometimes too. Unfortunately, husband was about 4 beers in (we were at a crawfish boil at a friend's house), so he was raring to go, to tell the whole truth. It started innocent enough, with some teasing about the new girlfriend in his life, but when we found out she wants to be a missionary for a living, it went south pretty quickly. The night ended with him sending about three pretty rude texts to his little brother. I haven't read them, but I believe they were along the lines of telling him that he's a dumbass for letting other people dictate his beliefs.

Again, I'd like to state, to anyone out there reading this who is a Christian, I have respect for your beliefs. This isn't about Christian vs. non, because little brother had always gone to church. This is about the deep-end he seems to have gotten himself into, this preachy, pushy, sect of Baptists, who risk life and limb to go to war torn countries to host Bible studies. There is real good done by missionaries all over the world, but these people aren't building schools or giving medical relief. They're preaching and "saving."

My husband is a super-rationalist. If he can't see it in black and white, or if he can't research it and find a fact verified in a couple different history books, or if he can't hear from a scientist (or two or three) exactly why something is the way it is, he's probably not going to believe it. Religion, organized religion that is-- there isn't even a question for him. He knows that organized religion is false. On spirituality, the questions of "Is there a God" and "Do we have a soul," he's more open to negotiation, which is why most Christians and other religious folks he doesn't have a huge problem with. But the purists and the ones who force their beliefs down other peoples' throats, they don't stand a chance with him.

I simply don't care. I don't care what Walt is, what he believes, as long as he's safe and happy and moving forward with his life. I don't agree with his religious beliefs either, but what difference does it make? As long as he's the same person.

Last night, laying in bed, husband kept saying "I give up" and "I just won't talk to him anymore until he changes his mind." This tore open the scar on my heart that was just starting to heal from when I kicked my own little brother out of my house. I don't talk to my brothers, and I think about that fact every day. Every day I wish that there was a way I could make my good-for-nothing drug-addicted brothers see what their lifestyle choices have done to my family, some way I could make them care about it again. But I can't. For my own sanity, I cut ties almost completely. But husband doesn't want to cut ties because of an issue like this; he's doing it to teach some kind of lesson, to prove some kind of point.

He's so damned stubborn. He thinks he's right, and that's all there is to it. I don't know how to get him to see my side, to see it from any other side but his own. He's making a mistake, I just know it. I told him over and over last night that we need to remain a positive presence in his life, that if we don't he'll fall further and further in with these people, and if we abandon him now, even if he does make it out on his own, he'll resent us. But husband is so determined that he's a "lost soul" now, that there's no point in even trying, so why not just write him off. He's only 21 years old. And he's the only brother I have now-- that's what hurts me the most. I don't want to lose another brother.

This isn't about me, though. This is about my husband coming to terms with the fact that not everyone agrees with what he thinks is right, that not everyone he loves will believe what he believes, but that doesn't make them bad people. He said last night he knows he can't control his parents' beliefs or his friends', but with his brother, who is 11 years younger, he thought he had some kind of chance to exert some sort of power to lead, guide, teach, but now that power is gone. His brother has grown up without taking into account the guidance he received from my husband, who wanted him to just think for himself, and it hurts him. Disappoints him. And scares him because these people are so far out of our comfort zone. He doesn't see how thinking for himself led him to the conclusion that this sect is right because they're so far outside of anything rational.

I really don't know what to do. I'm completely at a loss, which is odd for me. I'm disquieted, internally, and I feel this great need to solve this problem right away. Deb's post today at Catbird Scout helped me to put some of that into perspective, that maybe the disquiet is necessary, but it's maddening. I know there's some kind of lesson in it for me, but I want husband to get his lesson too. Last night I came to the realization that getting mad at my husband for his outburst wouldn't help. In fact, after I apologized for getting mad and tried to help him sort through his feelings, I could tell that having me to talk to was helping him already-- he went from mad to contemplative (and sad) as well. So I'm grateful to have had that inspiration, where ever it came from. But I need more, I need to know whether I should even be involved, whether I should try to contact and talk to Walt on my own, or what I can say to my husband to make him stop and consider other views. I feel lost right now, and upset, and frustrated by being lost and upset.

Pretty and Grateful Thursday

It's a glorious day outside, and inside me I'm glorious too. My sunburn is fading with no itching so far. The only bad part is that while it fades, it turns a weird shade of dark red/purple, but I can live with that. I also have on my new dress today, which makes me feel light and breezy and pretty. So there's two things to be thankful for, and I haven't even gotten to my list.

 1) Water, and my new healthy eating pattern. I haven't been perfect-- for instance, I had cinnamon toast crunch for breakfast this morning (what, I was in a hurry, and I can't stand for it to sit in the pantry uneaten just to go bad)-- but for the most part, I've switched my cookies and crackers and chips for strawberries, string cheese, and carrots with hummus. I've also started drinking a nalgene bottle full of water per day...

and have so far not had a coke zero since Sunday. I'm not planning on cutting coke out all together, but I do want to cut back. I'm feeling much more awake that I had been, much more energetic.

2) Going back to number 1 real quick. I was just reminded by my admin assistant how glad I am to have a positive relationship to food. I can recognize that I'm eating unhealthily and change it without going overboard and without freaking out about my weight or my calorie count or anything else. Food is nourishment, food fills me up with the vitamins and minerals I need to live a good life, and healthier food simply tastes better to me, most of the time. She's gone over the deep-end, counting her calories, eating plain turkey and carrot sticks for lunch, moaning and groaning all day if she happens to give in to a bite of cookie, talking about how she's going to have to run it off that night. Her facebook status updates always seem to involve food. A new employee mentioned one day in passing, jokingly, that she worried about her food too much, and five minutes later she was coming out of the bathroom with red eyes. She's thin, but not anorexic. Yet. Emily and I keep a close eye on her.

3) Wisteria. Although it attracts bees and wasps, it's so pretty. That purple is just so vibrant. There's a tree outside my office door that's wrapped up in a vine, and right now it's covered in the blue-purple hanging blooms.

4) Tough decisions finally being made at work. Our controller talked the talk and walked the walk when we hired him, but he hasn't proven to be what we need him to be. We need a decision maker, a tough cookie, someone that will stand up for us to outside vendors and to the boss himself, but he's more of a wall flower, waiting for direction from those above him before moving an inch. Plus, he's messed up a couple of very easy bills lately. It's gotten the boss's attention, and mine, and he's put me back in charge of our money again. The controller is still here at this point (he happens to be my boss's partner's friend... sigh) doing basic bookkeeping duties. We're going to bump him down to a bookkeeper, with a significant pay cut, or he has the option to quit. I'm thankful that the decision is made, because it was a hard one to make. It means more work for me in the meantime, but it's in the best interest of us all. Now we just have to have that conversation with him.

5) Finding inner peace. I'm not saying I've found it yet, but I'm inching closer. The big hurdle I need to cross is realizing that change won't kill me and that I can't prevent it, no matter how hard I try. I know this, logically, but living it is a whole other story.

baked

I am baked, and not in the fun way, but in the way that I can't let one leg touch the other, or wear long pants, or move too quickly. The Sunday sun roasted me like a chicken on a spit, and I'm the idiot that let it happen. But it was cloudy... I whined to my husband that night, who had also turned a teenage girl-approved shade of magenta, but I knew better. By the fourth inning of the game, I was already pinkish, and I threw on my cardigan backwards to cover my chest and arms. Finally in the 6th, a friend showed up with some SPF 15, but too little, too late. The damage was done.

I missed work yesterday-- how does one shower when one can hardly stand on the two crispy sticks formerly known as legs? I couldn't figure that out, and it hurt to move, so I got back in bed. On my back with no blankets. I worked from home, laying flat on the couch with my laptop on my stomach, only moving my legs to fix food or let the dog out. Last night was better, and today is better again. I am at work, in a cotton skirt that barely brushes my legs when I walk, which is not often since that's the only thing that still hurts to do. So far I've been called a "lobster," a "tomato," and a "strawberry," but I really feel more like boiled meat.

My legs, which don't look as red in this photo as they do in real life...

We spent a week every summer at the beach when I was a kid. My father is an attorney by trade (not necessarily by choice), and the bar convention holds its annual meeting on the Florida panhandle coast every July. By the time I was ten or eleven, we all knew you had to bathe me in sunscreen to keep me from getting burned, and any exposed skin-- a part in the hair, a ring around my waistband, a rouge toe-- was going to get burned, and bad. I guess my body had had enough at 15 because when my arms got burned that summer (a crazy burn too, I had a faint hand-print on my left shoulder from where I thought I had rubbed in lotion, but you know how attentive 15-year-olds are), I got sun poisoning. My arms itched so bad I sobbed the whole way home. I had to go to the emergency room and get a steroid shot. At age 17, after a sailing field trip with my geometry class (don't ask me what one has to do with the other), again my arms got fried. At this point I learned SPF 15 was no longer enough. The itching started again, and I got another shot.

This isn't just dry-skin-itch, either. The doctor said it's more like nerve damage, that the nerve endings in the burnt areas are all thinking "itch, itch, itch" as they're healing. It feels like bugs are crawling and biting and stinging me all at once, and the only thing that stops it is constant rubbing so I feel something else. It's miserable. Don't tell me about skin cancer, I know all about it. I don't burn in order to avoid this itch. It's much more present-tense.

Since that last time, I've behaved. I bathe in SPF 45 if I know I'm going to be in the sun for even 20 minutes. The worst I've gotten since then was the little curve around my hairline on my forehead on my honeymoon-- that Mexican sun is hot. Every baseball season I buy a new bottle of 45, and by the end of the season, two months later, it's gone. I hadn't bought my bottle yet this year, and since it was cloudy and only in the 70s on Sunday, I just didn't think about it, until it was too late.

Me, sneakily taking a snapshot with my Mac at work today. You can see the line between red and pale on my chest here. So glad I had my cardigan, or this would have been as bad as my legs.

So far, no itching, and fingers crossed, it won't come. Just thinking about itching makes me think I'm itching. It's a vicious cycle.

beliefs, and another Grateful Thursday

I was thinking this morning about belief and the power a strongly held belief can have. This all stems from the concern I've had for my brother-in-law, of course. I don't mean to offend when I talk about religion, but it just seems to me, as a non-religious person, that so many organized religions either consciously or subconsciously use brainwashing techniques, especially the "newer" religions. Walt is in a difficult place in his life right now, trying to figure out who he is and what he wants to do with his life, fresh out from under his momma's wing, innocent and clueless and not yet jaded. He's ripe for the picking, in other words, and I just don't want his mind to be clouded.

This is the time in life when beliefs are formed-- the beliefs that pretty quickly set into concrete in your heart, the ones that nothing can change. I do think that we look for things to reinforce the beliefs we already sort of have. For instance, being raised by a relatively free-thinking family, and with only brothers to relate to, I knew pretty early in life that being a girl was never going to hold me back. But I never put that concrete feminist to it until college, and it wasn't until then that I put absolute definitions as to what it means to me to be a woman in the world now and the way I believe women should be treated. I also always cared about animals-- we always had dogs and cats in our house-- but it wasn't until I was old enough to understand the history of the human/animal relationship and the way we affect their lives that I became a vegetarian and somewhat an activist.

That said, in regards to religion, I tried Christianity on for size in high school. I wanted to believe in a higher power, I wanted to believe there was some great being out there looking out for me. But intellectually it never felt right. Then I started taking deeper history classes in college, learned about the history of Christianity and the Council of Nicea and Constantine, and then I started exploring the history of other religions... none of it reconciled with what I had been taught in church, and I gave up on it. I simply decided, after doing all the research I could, that no one knows the truth, and no one ever will. So I'm happy in my agnosticism.

But I came to all these decisions on my own. Sure, teachers and preachers pointed me this way or that, but the decision was made on my own without influence in the end. I had heard all sides. Walt, though-- I feel has been taken in by people who will never let him hear another side. That's what scares me. If he hears it all and makes the decision for Christianity, that's one thing. But I'm afraid he's not going to get a chance.

As I was thinking all this on the way to work today, John Mayer's song Belief came on the radio. Read these lyrics (he's an amazing writer)-- they express so eloquently what beliefs and differences can do to this world.

Is there anyone who
Ever remembers changing their mind from
The paint on a sign?
Is there anyone who really recalls
Ever breaking rank at all
For something someone yelled real loud one time

Everyone believes
In how they think it ought to be
Everyone believes
And they're not going easily

Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword
Like punching under water
You never can hit who you're trying for

Some need the exhibition
And some have to know they tried
It's the chemical weapon
For the war that's raging on inside

Everyone believes
From emptiness to everything
Everyone believes
And no ones going quietly

We're never gonna win the world
We're never gonna stop the war
We're never gonna beat this
If belief is what we're fighting for

What puts a hundred-thousand children in the sand
Belief can
Belief can
What puts the folded flag inside his mother's hand
Belief can

That line about "a hundred-thousand children in the sand" always gets me. 

On to happier things...

1) Walt. I just want him to be happy.

2) April. Walking down my hall at work today, I looked up and out the glass door to see a blooming Japanese Magnolia framed by daffodils, the sun filtering through the leaves of a large oak to leave the scene dappled in light. I'm in short-sleeves and sandals, and it makes me so happy.

3) Healthier food. I do feel better. I was in a rush this morning and scarfed some cereal instead of stopping to make eggs, and I'm feeling sleepy again. But I have a great lunch set, so I know that will perk me up.

4) In contrast to number 3, Emily and I made April's Fools cupcakes for the office last night. I'm thankful to have her as a friend and also for whoever invented tiny cakes covered in yummy frosting...

Corn on the cob, peas and carrots, and mashed potatoes with gravy and butter

(aka cupcakes with frosting, jelly beans, starbursts, and melted butterscotch)

5) Tomorrow I don't have to work! Woo, a real day off! I have no idea what I'll do with it yet. Sleep late? Plan the space for my vegetables in my garden? Watch a movie? Who knows, but the day is all mine. Tomorrow night we're going to eat catfish with a good friend for her birthday, Saturday night is my favorite little nephew's (by love, not blood) third birthday party, and Sunday there's a baseball game and the weather should be glorious. Life is good.