It's all in the name

There was a funeral home/crematory right across the street from my favorite Sonic. It opened about 6 months ago and for 6 months I have intended to take a picture of the sign. I am the only person on earth who has a Blackberry without a camera in it. I couldn't remember to throw my camera in my purse. Well, anyway, this place never had any customers that I could tell, they had an elegant display of urns in the front of the window which you could see from the street and would house your beloved deceased tastefully on your mantle. This place recently went out of business. I am sure they provided loving services to the bereaved but I just don't think I could have turned the remains of a beloved to the BURNS-SHORT CREMATORY. What were they thinking when they named this place. They still have a website in case you were thinking I lost my mind and made it up. Google it.

Would you like some Whine with that Cheese

Yesterday sucked. I have been working my ass off and doing everything I could to get a promotion at work. Well, not an actual promotion which involved a lot of money or anything but a promotion with a title. I basically applied for the job I am already doing it just got a reclassified title but I had to apply for it anyway. I got an email from HR saying they had identified more qualified candidates than me and that I won't be considered for the job but please feel free to apply for another job anytime.

Well friends, as you see from my previous post my job started out as the job from HELL but I put on my big girl knickers and sucked it up and made chicken salad out of chicken shit. I have been a nurse since Moby Dick was a minnow and I am really good at it. Since Job from Hell started I have been applying for a new position. I have in fact over the past 9 months applied for 86 jobs with my employer. I am dead serious I even applied for food service to serve green beans on the lunch line. Every time I get the same computer generated email: "Thank you for applying but we have identified candidates who are better qualified..blah blah blah"
For the life of me I can't figure out the green bean job. I am a MOM, every mom knows how to sling beans on a plate. Maybe they thought I would look even less qualified in a food service hair net.

So anyway, I had a couple of cocktails which I haven't had since the Masters in April and took a sleeping pill and went to bed. I have been wide awake since 3 am. I don't sleep well when I am puzzled. I always have to try and figure out the logic in things. I never got the answer to this one and finally just got up.

I am on my third cup of coffee fortified with Stok caffiene shots and have smoked about 600 cigarettes. I walked through my apartment (which is about 5 steps round trip) and watched my grown babies sleeping, Walker with his size 13 1/2 feet hanging off the end of his bed with Cartoon Network blaring on the TV, Lizzy snoring quietly with Penelope Wolf clutched to her chest as she has been every night for 17 years, they are so beautiful. The best job I have ever had and succeeded in is being a Mom. I wish I was younger and had been able to have about 10 more of them.

I live in the heart of downtown Nashville and have been sitting on the stoop outside in my ratty nightgown drinking coffee, smoking like a chimney like white trash and all of a sudden I noticed the birds are back. They have been really quiet since the great flood. This morning they are all up early singing their spring birdie songs. They are singing about love and family and nests and worms. Not a care in the world. In my next life I am going to be a bird, a Mourning Dove I think because they look like Victorian Ladies. I want nothing more than to wake up early joyous, flirting with all kinds of boy birds til I find the right one and building a nest out of sticks and grass to raise my babies in. I would fly and soar and look down on people rushing around doing things they aren't happy doing and wonder why they don't just stop and enjoy the world like me.

Instead I have to be at a 7 o'clock meeting where I will hear the same old blah blah blah. I guess I need to go have another cup of coffee, put on my ever so flattering blue scrubs and head on off to the coal mine, but I will be wearing my neon sneakers which empower me and I will know this too will pass.
Have a great day everybody. This is the day the Lord has made, let us give thanks and be glad in it.

I'll start my blog with where I've been

OK, so here's what happened in a nutshell... November 2008 the parent company for Bobby Jones Apparel went belly up thus cutting off my main source of income, we went broke, lost our home, I cried, popped antidepressants and sleeping pills like candy and stayed asleep as much as I could. I was a lousy mother during that time and my precious little girl held me up. Walker graduated from Baylor in the spring of '09 and spent his summer getting us moved and settled into our apartment. I honestly do not know why I was not admitted to the psych ward and how I went to work everyday (more on the job thing later). On June 30 of '09 we lost our home. Through the grace of God and the kindness of a few friends and one total stranger we got a place to live 2 weeks before we were to become homeless.
Speaking of friends, I learned a valuable lesson about friends who really love you and friends who really aren't friends at all. When you lose all of your money, "friends" scatter like roaches when the light goes on. The people I thought I could depend on most either vanished or just acted like it's no big deal. My personal faves were the ones who compared their financial situations to mine while they have hot cars, second homes, country club memberships, elaborate vacations, food, gas, money and "Stuff". Then of course there are the friends who really love us. A dear friend, single mom of three little ones offered to get her boyfriend to finish out her basement for us to have a place to live. A precious and loving offer which we could not accept although she would not have allowed us to be homeless. One couple pays our rent every month because they really care that we have some quality of life. I know that with three kids in private school they could be using that money for something for their own family but they found it in their hearts to help out friends in need. A church which we do not even attend and who are of polar opposite beliefs than ours (or so I thought) made sure we had food on our table when we were wondering what to do with a can of water chestnuts, stale cheerios and half a jar of creamy peanut butter, which was all we had left.
During this time I also changed jobs. On top of the financial and familial upheaval, I started my new job and was almost instantly targeted by a bully whose goal was to completely break me. I was incredulous that at 57 years old I was the victim of a bully. I really needed ton of more stress. One day I was in the bathroom at work sobbing and Walker called me. He told me to quit my job that day, that the tuition benefit I had worked so long and hard for to educate them wasn't worth my health and that he and Lizzy would borrow every dime they needed to go to school. He was so sweet and so concerned but no way was I going to give up their education money, I earned that benefit. After taking my case all the way to the civil rights department I finally got the bullying stopped. God throws things at you for a reason, I now work in the same department, am successful and actually look forward to going to work everyday. Oh and for some reason the bully still works there, go figure.
A huge, amazing thing happened to me during this time. Through the grace of God and the wonders of Facebook I reconnected with my very best friend from high school who I lost touch with 40 years ago! She now resides in France of all places. Right before we lost our house she came to visit, we drank wine on the front porch till 6 AM and it was like 40 years had never passed. She has a cool French long distance calling plan where if she calls me on our land line it costs her nothing so we are as close as we were when we were 17. Technology is truly awesome. She has vowed to elp me in any way to get my children through college.
Lizzy had the most amazing, opportunity filled senior year of anyone I have ever known and graduated this May'10 cum laude from Father Ryan High School. She has been my joy and my strength through all of this, has learned way more than a child her age should have to and I am so sad that I spent most of her most joyous time a nervous doped hot mess of a human being. She is an amazing young lady.
I don't want to minimize Walker's suffering through our debacle. He was away, dealing with the heaviest school load he has ever faced and I am sure was worried sick about what was going on at home that he was powerless to fix. At 19 he developed severe hypertension which is partially bad genes he got from me and partially stress that I caused. He is on meds for it now and doing fine.
So in the end, we have our little family, our health, a roof over our heads, food on our table and most importantly we have learned that money (or the lack there of) doesn't define you, that "stuff" doesn't define you, that what you drive doesn't define you. We have learned that character defines you and that is all that matters. We love our God and have over time come to realize what a gift we were given when we lost our world as we knew it. He opened our eyes to what is truly important and to the needs of others less fortunate than we are.

So there's the story if anyone was wondering what really happened to us. I guess that was more like a giant peach than a nutshell, sorry about that. Now that I have let it out I will try very hard to make the rest of my posts more optimistic and maybe even funny now that my sense of humor is returning.