Ohmygodohmygodohmygod....

Things are happening. Things are happening faster than I thought they would. Since my last post, these things have happened - in list form!

~set up a website
~completed my next portrait
~completed the Bio and Contact pages on my website
~found an awesome place to get prints made
~have my first 'real' customer who wants a portrait done!!!

I'm excited and desperately wishing I could quit my job right now to do this full time... which would be jumping the gun, I think. I'm posting a link to my website in my sidebar. Ooh, of course you'll get to know me by my given name, rather than the one I chose. For the record, I prefer the one I chose.

The situation...

This evening, at around 7:45, Wolf started seizing.
"Should I call an ambulance?"
I called 911 about ten minutes later. (There was a ten minute delay because if he doesn't respond with something other than 'No,' he'll fight anyone who tries to help him. He's a big boy. By 8:00, the ambulance had arrived. The arrival of three fire and rescue trucks, two squad cars and a half hour later, they finally earned his co-operation in getting onto the cot. They even managed to get him strapped in before he got antsy again.

Then, I lost it a little. Then I got it together and went into the spare room where Kitten was watching TV.


Now, I've managed to get some food into me and I've called his friend.

I can't seem to bring myself to call any of my supports, though. I'm feeling like I'm in limbo. I feel the fear begin to rise... then it just stops. It totally dissipates.

Is this what shock is? If not, what is it? It's very clear and calm. Which is odd. I don't know.

And now, the exciting conclusion - with pictures!

In my last post (hahaha, I just spelled post like toast) I began telling of weather drama here on the wet-coast. Now, I shall complete the story with full colour pictures!

We here on the southern section of our not so little island feel a little panicky about just below freezing temperatures. Knowing that, imagine how most feel about this:

December 17th.

Not too bad... sort of. Our store ran out of salt on by the second day of snow. Shovels, too. We did manage to get our hand on an emergency shipment (five pallets) of salt on Friday which took a whole hour to go out the doors.

Then, this morning, we woke up to this:

December 21st.

Overnight two and a half inches of snow fell. We were thrilled. Oh, I really ought to qualify that. We, my family and I, were thrilled. Most of the other residents of the Valley were cursing.

I made it easily in to work. First, we have a killer 4X4 and the smarts to use it properly. Second, even if we had no vehicle at all, it takes me all of ten minutes to walk to work. The snow would have to be over three and a half feet before I could use the 'snowed-in' excuse. Sadly, I'm one of the two employees who are in this position. Of the usual Sunday building-centre-roster (eleven worker bees) seven of us made it in. By the end of the day, we were three. Within a few hours two were sent home. The snow was showing no signs of letting up and my Manager was concerned about their return trips home.

December 21st, lunch break.

December 21st, second coffee (two hours after lunch)

By the end of the day, three of us remained. We probably had about a below a hundred customers. The lumber yard stayed locked up all day. I took ten minute coffee breaks and a fifteen minute lunch. I was both cashier and paint department... I felt so popular. I was paged to the phone, to front cash and to paint... all day. One customer told me we should be getting paid double for our double duties... the owner disagreed, lol.

To see more fun pictures of our winter wonderland (complete with -18° C cold... -39° F) see this.

This is for anyone who thinks all of Canada is tundra-land.

Last week I was listening to a weather update on my local radio station.

Announcer: Today there will be periods of cloud with temperatures dropping overnight. Tomorrow's high will reach (pause for dramatic effect) minus one.

For those not familiar with the metric system Minus one Celsius is equivalent to 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

So there you have it. We here on the southern section of our not so little island feel a little panicky about just below freezing temperatures. Knowing that, imagine how most feel about this:

...


.....


...

Well. Um, I was going to post a current picture of our weather drama but it seems our camera-computer cord has gone south for the winter. As soon as I find it I will add the photo documentation.

To laugh or to cry...

Wolf called his Dad to see how his cataract surgery went. Dad was sleeping but Wolf's step-Mother informed him that he came out of the surgery completely blind. Seems the good doctors tore the lens in his good eye but left said lens in place to cause as much pain as possible before ER docs diagnosed the source of the pain and rectified it by taking it out.

He'll have to wait two months until the eye heals enough to have an artificial lens inserted.

What the hell is going on?!!

In other news, i should be taking Kitten and her friend to the movie store so they can pick movies and video games for this evening, her eleventh-birthday party.

Running away now!

Not the most graceful transiton.

I applied at my place of employment with the hope of working in the paint department. The thing is, they needed cashiers and I needed a job. I told them I was flexible. Silly me. They had me behind a till within 48 hours of receiving my resume and that is where I remained for the next two months. Early last week, my zone manager stopped me as I was heading out for a break.

ZM: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have some paint experience, don't you?"

I held my smart tongue (neglecting to point out that my most recent job experience, right there on my resume which she has in her office, was as a professional painter) and simply answered in the affirmative.

ZM: "You have experience tinting paint." She stated this, her voice and demeanour both unsure.

Me: "No. I have experience prepping, sealing/priming and painting/staining most surfaces. I have experience with the clean-up of a myriad of paint/stain products."

ZM: "Are you interested in learning how to tint?"

Me: "Very interested!" I have to work on my poker face.

At that point, she walked away with nothing more than a "Hmm." Such is her way. Such is the way of the whole freakin' company!! But that's not the point of this telling.

Yesterday, as I looked at our front-end break schedule, I noticed that I had a half-hour in the paint dept, immediately before our Yard Tour. The paint training was great! The yard tour never happened. But that's more of the 'not this telling' stuff. The paint training let me know that I was beginning the transition, even if no one else deemed in necessary to tell me.

Last night, I went to sleep at about 10:30. It was a late bedtime for my scheduled 6:30 am start today but Supernatural was on. You' know how it is? I knew something was wrong before I awoke. I was dreaming about working, typing a list of numbers into the computer. I was feeling really ill and it was messing with my concentration. As the feeling passed, the dream would fade to black, only to return a bit later. Typing. Feeling sick. Mixing up the numbers. Fade out. That cycle continued until, during a semi-lucid moment, my consciousness clicked and I woke fully. Sure enough, I had to camp out in the bathroom for a while. I don't know what it was but I threw up. I never throw up! I guzzled water to aid in my body's betrayal. I took my temperature, twice, but had no fever. What the hell!? And then I went back to bed.

Today, I got up when my alarm went off and dragged my feet through my morning routine, leaving a few things out due to sheer exhaustion. My belly felt okay enough but I was really weak and shaky. I couldn't risk eating anything as I can't afford to miss a day of work. I did, however, drink a few sips of coffee - maybe a quarter mug.

Opening cash means pushing open the automatic, sliding doors, walking to the back of the store, climbing 21 steps to the staff room, swiping in, descending the same 21 steps back to the main floor, trudging back to the front doors but turning to the management office stairs. Up 21 more stairs (but these ones have a landing!) to get to the safe-room.

I was cashing in the first of two tills and my co-opener (and good friend Bou) cashed in the first of her two, when a third cashier (SM) walked in. Bou and I both asked SM why she was there, the answer to which was "to open." And then it hit me.

I left Bou and SM to their open and went to seek out the paint dept schedule. It turns out that I wasn't scheduled to begin shift until 9 am. In fact, I was there and punched in a half hour before my new team lead arrived.

Let me just tell you how much I heart my new team lead. She told it was perfectly alright if I continued my shift as I though it was scheduled. She was awesome about my lack of vigor and didn't once ask me if I had to go home. It's nice to work with another grown up. I was out of there at three, which was wonderful because I don't think I'd have made it to 5:30, and in the time I was there I tinted several gallons and one pint of paint. I learned how to change formula for tinting a 20L pail so it works in a one gallon tin (and vice versa). All in all a productive day considering the productive night before.

Let me tell you, also, that I now have 3.5 days per week in the paint dept. I have both pertinent schedules and I can no longer keep my horrible dyslexia under control... someday I'm going to type out an entry without touching the backspace key. That'll be funny... kind of.

Oh Lord, please let me sleep, tonight!

Finally growing up…

I grew up with the label “Wise beyond her Years.” I was a very observant child and because of that a lot of my knowledge seemed instinctive and rather like common sense. Whether it was relationships or life in general, it all just made sense to me.

I should qualify all this by saying that I was a font of sage advice but I was really lousy about using that knowledge in my own life. In fact, I made all the wrong decisions when it came to my own path. I dropped out of school. I had every intention of getting pregnant at sixteen and succeeded, brilliantly. I dated abusive losers and ‘dealt’ with it using alcohol. I grew into a career welfare-mom - which, for the record, I have no prejudice or bias against, but it was a cop- out for me. I didn’t choose stay-at-home mom-hood because that’s what I really wanted to be. I chose it because I was too afraid to try anything else.

Any time I have stepped outside of my comfort zone, I’ve let my anxiety eat at me until my only option was ‘disability.’ If wallowing were an Olympic sport, I’d have a trophy room full of gold medals. Never have I pushed through the intense ‘I don’t want to…’ until this past September. I think the difference this time was that I didn’t have a choice. There was no bail-out, no crutch, no magical way back to quasi-safety. My family was vulnerable and I was their salvation.

Transition is never easy. At first, I thought I was dying and then, when I didn’t die, I wished I would. I spent a few weeks there, in that hellish place. During that time, even when I had good weeks my days off were stressed by thoughts of having to go ‘back to that place.’ And then, without really noticing, I was okay. Not only that but my life was changing in ways I hadn’t even imagined.

Flip to today. I spent my morning getting Kitten to her swim lesson (it’s a 13-26 minute drive, depending on highway traffic) by 11, and subsequently chatting it up with home-schooling Moms until noon. Wolf was up sick most of the night so it was just me, today. At the lesson’s end, Kitten took her requisite 15 minutes to change out of her swim gear Then we drove 20 minutes back home to eat lunch and pick up Wolf so we could head back into town to do a “whack of running around” that he needed to get done.

During this time I had my first of two epiphanies. We had been walking for about two and a half hours when Wolf asked me if I was okay with being out all day. I replied that I was no longer thinking of my Tuesday/Wednesday weekend as ‘days off.’ After all, life doesn’t stop so it makes more sense to think of it as ‘days not at work.’ Wolf commended me on the overall mental health in that statement and I’ve been repeating it to myself ever since, hoping that I will feel better about it the more it reverberates through my head.

A couple of hours later we were eating dinner. Wolf had shovelled a forkful of piping hot food into his mouth. When he exhaled trying to cool his mouth, he shot steam worthy of a dragon from his lips. We all laughed and I tried to do the same thing but my food had cooled too much. I said, “If that had worked for me, this place would be way too cold.” That is the moment the second revelation hit. I realized that it wasn’t too cold in our house. That was the first time I had ever had that thought during winter months.

We do keep our house cool, about 15C - that’s 59F if you’re Imperial. This year, due to unforeseen growth, I have taken to wearing weather appropriate clothing. This means no more shorts and tank tops, even in the house. I wear slippers, with or without socks. It’s the wildest thing.

So, throughout this growth phase of mine, I somehow moved beyond a sense of entitlement I didn’t even know I had. Will the wonders ever cease?!

Delicious!

I love it when my Husband runs into the bedroom and says, with urgency, "Open your mouth!"

I love it more when this is immediately followed by the introduction of my tongue to a chocolate cream puff. A gluten free, dairy free cream puff!!


What the heck were you thinking?!