Stream of Consciousness Rambling. With a Soundtrack. October 11, 2012

Hello all.

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Ok, so right now, here’s how I’m feeling:  restless.  I’m at work, and I’m all caught up, and I’m completely alone in the building, and I’m bored senseless.  I’m listening to my iTunes (yes, in a church building.  Currently I’m hearing “What Doesn’t Kill You (Makes You Stronger)” and desk-dancing to it)  I’m dying to text someone and check in to say hi.  Almost anyone will do at this point.

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Man, I wish I could dance.  My favorite self-disparaging remark on my dancing talent is that I move like the Tin Man getting electrocuted.  I’m listing to “Dynomite” now, and I’d love to be up and moving instead of sitting here typing and tapping my toe and bobbing my head and shoulders.  That’s about the extent of my rhythmic abilities.

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Next up, “Firework.”  I would so love to sing this one at karaoke.  And I think I will, eventually.  We’re having karaoke at the next family reunion if I have to sell a kidney on the black market.  At least I can sing here at work.  It goes over a lot better in an empty church building than behind the counter at the register at the UPS Store.  (That’s where I worked before, and where I plan on spending a few Saturdays leading up to Christmas.  Extra funds for gifts for the spoiled rotten offspring, you know.)

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I actually love the freedom of this job.  I can come in and leave whenever I want.  I can bring my kid with me and homeschool him.  I can listen to music and sing, and hope someone doesn’t come down the hall and surprise me making a fool of myself.  As long as I get my tasks done and don’t do anything sinful in the process, they don’t care.  I literally write and sign my own paycheck.  It’s actually kinda weird.

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And finally, we’re hearing “Fire Burning” by Sean Kingston.  This is another one I’d kill to be able to dance to, no kidding.  Maybe I ought to just check into lessons or something.

A Different Church Building (Photo credit: justshootingmemories) Our building looks a little like this.

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Ok, well, must go now, because my co-worker/boss will be here shortly and requires my assistance to follow him over to the tire shop and give him a ride back over here, so I’d better go clean out my embarrassing car.  The inside isn’t even the most embarrassing part.  The worst part is the horrible screeching grinding sound my brakes are making continuously, even when I’m not braking.  I really need that looked at, but I can’t afford it right now.  Y’all can pray they don’t fail at the most inopportune moment and get me killed.

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Thanks for listening to my ramble along with my dance party playlist.  More later.  Holla! 🙂

Until next time,

D.

 

The Time Is Now. August 5, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Hello all.  After posting my last two entries detailing the race in all its muddy glory, I am using my little bloggy world here to share another thing I am doing that is very much a leap of faith.  As all my real-world friends know, even though I work at a UPS Store, I’m actually a certified teacher.  A certified teacher who had a first year of teaching after graduation in December 2007 which was difficult in and of itself, but which culminated in a tornado, a fire, a job resignation and a marital separation, all within the space of two months.  Suffice to say, I was battle-scarred and very scared and unprepared to give teaching another try. 

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But I’m a different person now.  I’m different physically and I’m different mentally.  I have struggled financially and emotionally for the last two years with the aftermath of my first year of teaching, and I am ready to take a leap of faith.  The idea won’t get out of my head.  The desire to teach is there.  So even though I’m a little nervous and scared about this, (Ok, a LOT!) I am submitting an application and resume to Ardmore High School today.  They pushed the start of school back, in part because of the insane heat, but mostly because they are still desperately short on teachers!  One of the teachers there, with whom I did some of my observations in college, talked to my friend from work the other day, and begged and pleaded with her to tell me to apply, ASAP.  And so… before I go to work today, I am going to take my application to the admin office and drop it off.  And tell it to Go With God.  🙂

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I am trusting that whatever happens will be God’s will for me.  If that’s where He wants me to be, I’ll get it, and if it’s not, I won’t.  Obviously, I’ll put my best effort into it and everything, but I will trust in Greater Powers for the outcome.  Interviews are difficult for me- as I said on Facebook earlier today, I get all nervous and turn into a cross between Forest Gump and The Other Sister!!  So if I get an interview, pray for me to be calm, cool, and collected and to remember how to talk like a normal person!

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Thanks for your support!

Until next time,

D.

One Warthog, Ready to Ship! January 14, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Hello all.  This post promises to be incoherent and only mildly lucid, but with any luck it will at least be somewhat amusing.  I’ll tell you about the title in a minute.  First, a few random, unconnected facts:

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1) My son is afraid he won’t be able to sleep tonight because he’s afraid of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-er.   He got that idea from an episode of Goof Troop, of all places.  I hate TV! 

2) I am already recovering from my brief off-road detour from sanity into obsession with the DisBoards.  I still read them every day, but the top of the Theme Park Attractions and Strategies board is not currently filled with topics that hold any interest for me.  I recently came to the realization that I’m not going to be able to make it through a conversation without mentioning the D-word for most of this year.  Up to May, it will be excitement over our upcoming trip.  After May, it will be talking about something that happened ON our trip.  Or perhaps what I’d like to do on our NEXT trip.  Either way, the outlook is not good, as the Magic 8 Ball would say, for my conversation to consist of much variety in the near future.

3) RMB* and I worked on the storage shed today.  We cleaned out a bunch of stuff and brought some other stuff  designated to be garage sale fodder back to my house.  I was very proud.  And then I fell into the pit of memories of the days immediately before and after the tornado and the fire, and had a short cry.  We were talking, and he could tell I was about to start getting weepy, and he reached out and held my hand.   It was nice. 

4) The last few days, as I have taken the kids to school, I have said goodbye to Daughters S. and J. with a feeling of sadness, but also with pride.  “There go my little girls.  They’re such good girls, and they are so beautiful, and next year they’ll be seniors, and I can’t stand it!”

5) Yesterday I was talking to people at work about going overseas to teach EFL when the girls graduate.  Today all I could think was that I do not want to teach, not here, not there, not anywhere.  I don’t want to be 10,000 miles from my daughters.  I do not want to run off and leave them just for the sake of seeing what life looks like from somewhere other than here.  But right now, right this second, I can almost see it again.  I think I’m bipolar.  Or perhaps just the Queen of Wishy-Washy.  (Hi, GB!)

6) I had yet another moment of pride in Daughter S. and The Boy this morning.  Somehow, someone said something about ‘pancreas’ and both of them started singing Weird Al‘s Pancreas song.  I love that I’ve passed my appreciation for Weird Al to my kids.  Two of them, anyway.  Daughter J. can’t stand his music.  Poor, humor-challenged youngster.  🙂

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And now, as promised, the explanation.  The title of today’s post was something I heard today at work.  Those exact words.  Literally.  Yes, that’s right, I shipped a warthog today.  Actually, it was only a warthog head, taxidermied.  But we shipped it.  And some kind of long-necked elk, and a necklace made from the warthog’s teeth.  (Which are abnormally large and sharp-looking, in case you ever wondered.)  We ship some odd stuff around there. 

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Until next time,

D.

A Long, Hard, Hungry Day, and a Big Number! December 14, 2010

Hello all.  This is the time of year when I frequently know what total exhaustion feels like.  Today was one of those days.  It was weigh-in day at Weight Watchers, so I didn’t eat breakfast.  (Yes, I know, bad habit that I need to work on changing.  Maybe later.)  I had WW, then went to my counseling session with the Golden Goddess.  Then I had to go straight to work, because I knew they were going to be swamped, as they were swamped all day yesterday. 

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At this point I had two choices.  I could a) take my highly nutritious microwavable meal to work and heat it in the microwave there and eat it before clocking in (especially seeing that I wasn’t officially due to be there for almost an hour) or b) I could heat and eat in the counsellor’s office because she didn’t have anyone scheduled right after me today.  Well OBViously I wasn’t going to go sit there at work and calmly eat my lunch while the boss and my two co-workers were buried under with customers.  So I ate my lunch in the office and after stopping at a nearby convenience store to get a diet soda to take with me, I went to work. (and luckily for me, they had fresh fruit there, so I snagged an apple and a banana. I ate the banana on the way and saved the apple for later.) 

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Turned out to be a good thing I stopped and got the fruit, because as tasty and healthful as my meal was (Healthy Choice Rosemary Chicken and Sweet Potatoes = Yummy!!!)  it was very light and only 4 points on WW, so it didn’t hold me too well to the end of the day.  Now granted, it was approximately 11:15 a.m. when I ate lunch, and I get out of work at approximately 6:00 p.m. so I guess it’s normal that I would be hungry before it was all over, no matter what I had eaten for lunch!   

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So about halfway through the afternoon, I got so hungry I felt like I would be sick, so I went in the back room and snacked on the apple.  I only ate a few bites at a time between helping customers- just enough that I felt I could make it a little longer without hurling.  Oh, I also guzzled a Low Sodium V8 I had brought the day before, thinking that it might provide an energy boost.

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But I guess we had just been too busy, and I had packed and shipped and carried and stacked way too many boxes, because when closing time came around… I was EXHAUSTED!  It was one of those times where I felt like it wouldn’t have taken much to make me cry just for the release of it.  So then here comes the icing on the cake- my mom brings the kids by, and The Boy is grouchy and cranky, Daughter S. is cranky because I am cranky, and Daughter J. is heartbroken because her friends are incredibly unfair and stupid! 

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Anyway, Mom took them to their class. I finished work, waited for Mom to bring me The Boy, and then we killed time until the girls would be finished. (8:00 p.m.)  The Boy and I sat at McDonald’s, not eating, just using the playroom for a while.  Finally, we went to go pick up the girls and made it home.  (But not before we stopped BACK by McDonald’s and zoomed through the drive-thru, leaving one of our items there, necessitating me driving all the way back into town to get it, because its absence went unnoticed until we got home!)

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I guess the attempted point of the whole story was just that we were extremely busy today, and I experienced severe blood sugar drop, and I was cranky and worn out and just wanted to cry, but I got home and fixed me a couple of sandwiches on reduced calorie bread, with deli-sliced turkey, fat free mayo, and lettuce, spinach, cucumber and guacamole.  They were darn good, and I was so proud of myself for not getting anything from McDonald’s, even though I was ravenous!

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I guess it’s that kind of perserverance and determination that has allowed me to be able to say:  I HIT 80 LBS LOST AT WW THIS MORNING!!! 🙂  Oh yeah, go me!  Boo-yah!  I didn’t realize it until tonight when I was doing my online tracking, and I discovered that the receptionist at the meeting had calculated wrong, and I had actually hit the number!  I thought I was .8 shy of having lost 80 lbs, but I’ve actually lost 80.2.  Woo hooooooo!

Until next time,

D.

A Battle Hard Fought Is a Battle Half Won? December 11, 2010

Hello all.  I realized something recently.  I am a food addict.  And… a compulsive eater.  I think.  All this week at work I’ve experienced an intense desire to eat in the late afternoon.  No way I could be actually hungry.  Well, not very, anyway.  I just want to eat.  I want to put stuff in my mouth and consume it.  I want to gnash my teeth on something, taste the sweetness or saltiness or whatever is available.  Friends… I HATE IT!!!! 

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I hate that feeling worse than anything in the world, like I’m stuffing my feelings, my emotions, my energy level, and whatever else threatens my serenity at the moment.  Granted, my job is fairly high stress, especially at this time of year.  (I work in a UPS Store.) We’re busy, it’s fast-paced, it’s physically tiring, and I have one co-worker who is literally out of touch with reality and who, I believe, has completely gone ’round the bend.  But we can’t fire her- we can’t get through the Christmas season without her.  She makes everybody who works there (and half the customers) just shake their heads in sheer disbelief AND want to slam their fingers in a door or two, but we can’t get rid of her.  Not until after the holidays.  (Although believe me, I’m working on a good reason.  If things play out the way I expect they will, the boss will have no choice but to let her go if he wants to keep me.)

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Regardless of stress, crazy co-workers or whatever, I cannot allow my feelings to dictate what I put in my mouth and when.  I just never noticed before how strong the compulsion was!  I found myself struggling so many times this week, just WISHING there was SOMETHING in the breakroom I could EAT!  And sometimes there was, and I had to fight to resist it.  Sometimes I had brought healthy stuff, stuff with low Weight Watchers PointsPlus values, but other times I just had to have a small nibble of whatever was there and go on.  I have brought apples, baby carrots, grapes, low-carb shakes to work, but sometimes all there is in the fridge is a half-eaten Hershey bar or package of peanuts.  I’ve been eating the chocolate one tiny square at a time or the peanuts 8 or 10 at a time, when I simply have to have something to pick me up.  I’ve noticed that the drive to put something in my mouth often comes after we’ve cleared out a small rush of customers, when I’m physically worn out.  At those times, I think maybe it’s not so much an emotional eating thing as it is that I really do need a burst of energy to keep me going, and my body screams at me to fuel it! 

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Either way, I am continuing to try to follow the Weight Watchers plan.  It’s a daily struggle, a literal battle to resist eating things I shouldn’t.  I’m shoving baked Tostitos in my face at this very moment, even though I’m deep into my weekly points today.  It’s not good.  Not good at all.  I want to be thinner.  I want to be healthier.  I want to have more energy.  I want to maybe be a Weight Watchers leader someday.  I won’t be able to do or have or be any of that if I can’t learn to control my actions when my mind or my stomach or my body in general screams at me to put something in my mouth!  It’s terrifying, if you want to know the truth.  I know, it sounds a little dramatic, but if you’re skinny, if you’re a happy regular exerciser, if you’ve never felt what it feels like to have an overwhelming urge to eat something for no good reason, I’m not sure if you can understand.  The fear is there that I’ll never conquer it, that I’ll never be able to consistently win the battle and resist eating what I shouldn’t, when I shouldn’t, and how much I shouldn’t!  Some days it’s just. so. hard.

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Anyway.  I’ll just keep going, because I know for sure that if I quit trying, I’ll never win, and that self-control is just like any muscle.  You have to exercise it, and it gets easier the more you do.  I have to count on that.

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Until next time,

D.