Tamssmat

So today, the beginning of our holiday (Labor Day) weekend, was our 3rd annual party because it’s hot parking lot party at work.  This party originated within my first year with this Agency as a result of there having been a long time in between company outings and days off etc.  I was tasked with coming up with something and that was all there was.  And the parking lot party just because it’s hot outside was born.

We close at 2 on the Friday before Labor Day so we end up shutting down operations at noon and cooking out in the parking lot and taking up two of the Dr.s parking spaces and really just standing around eating and talking.  Then usually within a half hour, most everyone gets hot and goes inside and then gets back to work.  I however, would rather blog.  We usually all bring something to eat so it’s a potluck of sorts and the office pays for the meat.  This year though, we had the office birthday celebration two days ago and I didn’t feel like anyone should be asked to bring food twice in one week so the office bought it all.  That was a fun trip this morning.  I took Brooke to the grocery store with me because she’s the one with the company credit card since I moved out of accounting and into HR.  We went through the store throwing miscellaneous crap into the cart that we thought would be tasty and then hit the alcohol and chocolate isles full force.

I also have a candy bowl at my desk so I try to stock up on chocolate as often as I can.  The office can devour some chocolate so we’re frequently experiencing detox because Tams doesn’t feel like going to the store every other week but this time since I was already there I thought, why not?  I’m also not a beer drinker, so I just got a case of Bud Light, Coors Light and Miller Light.  They don’t like that, tough.  BRING YOUR OWN!  I digress.

Now, I’m eagerly awaiting the 2:00 hour so I can leave the office and go get my nails done.  They’re looking pretty craptastic lately.  I know you care.  Admit it.  You do.  It’s OK.  And then I’m pretty sure I’m going to spend the rest of the evening in my jammies, curled up on my couch, reading.  Hell, I probably won’t move from that spot all weekend except to go potty and find food.  The boy won’t be happy with me but when is he?  Teen angst has set in in full force.  He hates everything right now.

Ta.

So a friend recommended a book to me called ‘A Walk in the Woods’ by Bill Bryson.  I bought it after reading the back and thinking it had great potential.  (And let’s just go ahead and admit that this friend was Katie.  Why even try to be mysterious about that?)  It’s a nice little book about a fella that decided to walk the Appalachian Trail.  With the sentence on the back “for a start there’s the gloriously out-of-shape Stephen Katz, a buddy from Iowa along for the walk” it promised to be an entertaining read as well as educational.  I don’t know anything about the Appalachian Trail and why not learn something about it?  Every now and then I get an itch to be outdoorsy.  It almost always goes immediately away but still.  Maybe I wanna try it!  I can’t say too many bad things about this book because overall, it is pretty good.  Bill Bryson is a very good writer and I’ll probably purchase something of his again in the future.  The problems were:
1. He’s very interested in peppering his book with evolution.  I don’t particularly care what he believes, I just don’t need it shoved in my face every other page.
2. He didn’t walk the whole trail.  The book started off with him planning to walk the whole trail and it was a huge let down that he flaked out on it.  He went home, then had his wife drop him off and another more Northern entrance to the trail.  This isn’t roughing it in the woods as I felt I was promised.
3. There’s a bear on the front cover.  This leads me to believe that there will be an encounter of SOME sort.  Nope.  Nada.  No animals.
4. I can judge him a good writer based solely on the fact that I read the whole book and it was interesting yet nothing happened.

About a month or so later, I read ‘Survive!’ by Peter Deleo.  Now this book was fascinating.  He was seriously trapped in a bad situation and walked around in the winter mountains for 13 days with no food or heat and walked out alive to tell the story.  The only problem with his book is that he writes in clipped sentences.  He’s not a born writer.  He’s in fact quite bad at it.  The only reason I stuck with it is because I wanted to know how he was when he got out.  Sure, I could have skipped ahead but that’s against my religion.  My reading religion.  I have a sick relationship with books.  Much like my sick relationships with some people.  I’ll stick it out to the very end just in case it’s worth it.  It usually is.  With both people and books.  The difference being that I don’t typically give people a 1st chance whereas I’ll start every book I buy and then I’m forced to finish it.  Again, loyal to a fault this one is.  I digress.

My solution?  I suggest someone marry the two books into one.  Get Bill Bryson to write about Peter’s harrowing days in the wilderness.  Now THAT would be a good book!!

1. The fire place
2. Solitary confinement
3. Lots and lots and lots of books.  Lots.
4. It has a name.  How many rooms in your house have a name?
5. The couch from Greg’s office - FREE
6. Pictures of my loved ones on every wall
7. Invisible book shelves
8. It’s tiny and cozy and homey
9. The dog tends to stay out when I’m in here
10. The boy can take over the rest of the house, this is MY ROOM.

I’m in an unusual predicament that I don’t know yet how to handle.  I have never been in this position in what now seems like a short life and it’s increasingly frustrating.  I love my job.  I love that I have room for growth.  I love what I get to do.  Payroll, interviews, review resumes, work on boosting morale with fun things for the staff, advise management on ways to improve things et al.  The problem lies in the circumstances under which I work.  I am incredibly unhappy right now with my current situation.  I’ve spent the last week working on getting over what was bothering me and just focusing on enjoying the parts of my job that I enjoy.  The advise that I was given about leaving was that no one should hate going to work.  No one should take that frustration home.  If these things are happening, then maybe it is time to move on and that’s OK.  I was advised to make a decision on whether or not I was going to resign, and then sleep on that decision for 72 hours.  The problem with that is, I cannot make this decision on my own.  There have been so many days in my almost 3 years with my office that were good and that made it worth the hours and the stress and the pressure among other things.

I want nothing more than for it to become that place for me again.  This is what makes me wonder if I’m just suffering from something temporary that might retreat if given the proper amount of time.  Unfortunately, I don’t know that I will be allowed that time.  Things can go any number of ways, some of which I have no control over.  This increases the frustration.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently also contemplating tendering my resignation.  Has it come to that?  How do I decide?  How do I make sure that I’m making the right decision both for me and for them?  What can I do to improve things when it feels like any suggestion that I make is slapped down with no respect for the position in which they pay me?  I don’t feel like I provide any value at this point and maybe that’s truly my issue.  Everything that I have disagreed about has been snapped at and shut down.  So why bother trying to express anything that isn’t in agreement?  I feel like my new boss is trying to take over the parts of my position that make it what it is.  What I feel that I’m being left with is just the paperwork and I could teach any monkey to do that part.  Of course, this therefore saves everyone from needing to pay me any more than I’m currently making which is also a concern of mine so maybe that is my answer.  Maybe this is by design and I’m just slow on the uptake.

I can come up with reasons and excuses all night long but somehow none of it makes me feel any better.

I think this is beyond my control and I can be happy just bringing in a paycheck for now.  But this is not what I was meant to be.  I understand that there are things that are beyond my control.  I know that there are people out there in worse situations that my own.  I know that running away from a problem doesn’t solve anything.  I can tell myself these things for a long time and get by.  But at some point, I just start to feel like I’m not doing my part.  Contributing to my own happiness.  Isn’t that why God gave me free will?  Well, not exactly, no.  He gave me free will so I could choose to follow Him and not others but you know what I mean…Right?

It’s what I like to compare to an abusive relationship.  At what point to you take responsibility for getting out of a bad situation.  At what point do you determine that it is no longer a good situation for you?  At what point do you determine that it will never be a good situation for you?  Will it?  Won’t it?

Ah, these are the questions of life…

What touches my heart, dee deet dee deet dee dee dee. (See the worst movie ever made ‘Ishtar’ to get the reference.)

So every Saturday morning I get together with my knitting bitches for breakfast and stitching. It’s good times. Quality time with my dear friends that I love.  This past Saturday we drove up to Bill and April’s house for some good old fashioned time in the country.  After having breakfast which we seem to have made part of the arrangement (that whoever hosts also cooks and this will likely end when it comes my turn again) we got cozy in their living room and got down to the business of knitting.  Creating things out of yarn.  This is very fun I tell you!!  I don’t care what they say.

So around about 11:00a, Tams starts to get sleepy and needs a nap so I suggest to April that we turn the TV on so I have something to doze off too.  We flipped around a bit and landed on the summer Olympic games.  I’m not typically a fan of the Olympics, but there’s been buzz around the office about it and of course Katie can’t stop cooing about the swimmers so why the hell not?  One good reason…Synchronized swimming.  This is what was on and sadly, we watched it.  At first it was like the proverbial train wreck in that we just couldn’t stop watching it.  Then it was more of a gross factor because those girls put their feet and faces in places I won’t get caught dead putting mine, not even for a gold medal.  I do understand that it is a physically demanding “sport” and that it is not easy but the commentator lady was taking everything very very seriously.  After watching the Americans and then the Chinas, it became more funny than anything.  I’m pretty sure Katie was giggling through most of it.  By the time we got to the Russians, I was like, WOW, they better win.  And they did!!  So I guess in the end I got sucked in but if anyone ever asks me, I’ll deny it.  Through most of it, I couldn’t stop saying “gay”.  “This is so gay”.  “I can’t believe how gay this is”.  “GAY!”

So I’m on vacation this week and trying to make the most of it.  And by trying to make the most of it I mean of course, spending the whole week on my couch, reading.  That lasted a day before I was swept away on a day trip to Amish country, also known as Jamesport, MO.  It amuses me greatly that they have an official website.

It was a very fun day!  A nice long ride up there, nice weather for it, lurking around and gawking (for which I still feel slightly uncomfortable), shopping.  I am reading a book right now by Jodi Picoult called Plain Truth about the Pennsylvania Amish so this trip was somewhat relevant to my plans of laying around reading.  It was fun to get to go out and experience a little bit of what I was reading about.  See the buggies, see them barefoot in the store.  But I felt like I was at the zoo.  I can’t for the life of me figure out why they would be OK with tourists coming to their town to observe them and take pictures but that’s exactly what I did and why I now feel remorse.  Oh, it won’t stop me from going back.  They’ve got some great stuff there that I must return and purchase.  I guess that’s how people can justify their behavior, by contributing to the economy of Jamesport and how they can justify what seems to me like being on display.  I don’t know how they do it and I’d love to get to sit down for an afternoon and discuss it with them.  Alas, I don’t think that’ll happen so I’ll continue in ignorant bliss back here in the air conditioned home that I love so much.  In the city.  Away from farm and poop smells.  For the record, I love Jodi Picoult but this book is rather boring.  In fact, I’m deciding that her books are all very similar.  Which is frustrating in that I thought I had found an author that I loved, that could move me and I’m hoping that it’s just this book.  I don’t really recommend it but I do still highly recommend My Sister’s Keeper.  Read it before the movie comes out.

We didn’t stay very long really because we got a late start.  Nap time was important and had to come first.  See, since I’ve started this vacation, I’ve been enjoying naps.  LOTS of naps.  This has thrown off my ability to sleep through the night thus increasing my need to nap during the day.  ANYWAY, we got up there in the late afternoon so we didn’t really do a whole lot of driving around and sight seeing (which feels mean to even say that I would, but I totally would).  We visited a few stores, and I scouted out some things that I must acquire thus requiring a return trip and then we wound our way back home via the back roads.  That was fun too.  It was longer and slower but much more beautiful (and poop smelling) and I got to see baby cows, baby horses and little goats.  OH, and good old fashioned Northern Missouri nowhere townfolk.  That was interesting.  And that’s about all I can say about that.

On the back of a motorcycle, while winding through country roads, one is afforded a lot of time to think.  And oh the things that were going through my head, but that’s another blog for another day.  Mostly I was ranting in my head about work things and emails that I had gotten via my crackberry and my inability to disconnect for one day.  But I also let my mind wander to things that I don’t tend to have time to think about in the middle of a weekday, normally.  Things like, “I wonder what the boy is doing right now” and “where the hell am I?” and “oh crap, I really need to redo my nails”.  Important things you see.

Overall it was a wonderful day and one that I won’t soon forget.  Exhausting, dirty, educational and a cheap way to blow an afternoon!!  I like cheap!!  I think I slept better last night than I have in weeks.

I’m on vacation this week.  Which really means I get to work from home.  But I can’t complain.  I have a sick need to be connected and to know what’s going on and to be a part of it all.  And I didn’t log on at all yesterday.  It was a beautiful day.  It is apparently a good week to take off work because the heat at the office is at an all time high.  Couple that with the carpet being brought in and the desks being put back and you have an office of mayhem.

Have you ever been away from something for so long that when you get back to it, you have a weird sense of being back where you should be yet there’s a mystery and newness about it??  I’m there right now.  It’s confusing.  It’s exciting.  It’s exhilarating at times even.  Yet there’s this feeling in the back of my mind that is telling me that I already know how this is going to end.  Sure, it’s different this time.  A lot different.  But the old fears are still there.  I’ve always been one that has undying devotion.  I’m loyal to a fault.  Case in point?  My job.  I love it, it loves me.  I hate it and it also hates me.  Will I leave it?  Hell no.  At least I sure don’t intend to.  My parents taught me a lot of things but one of them was not to run away from a problem.  It’ll only pop up worse later on down the road.  Deal with it now and learn from it.

I’m learning to take things one day at a time.  Let go and let God.  It’s not easy my dear friends.  I want to steer things in the ways that I think they should go.  Because of course I am always right.  Right now, I am struggling with wanting to know what is going to happen, where things will go and at the same time, not wanting things to go anywhere.  I feel like every time I gather information, that I’m pushing where I shouldn’t be.  But that’s only due to the history.  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t feel reserved showing interest.  Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do after all??  So I’ve found myself just restraining from saying anything.  Let go and let God.  Whatever will be will be.  For right now??  I’m comfortable where I am, mostly.  Its different, familiar, new, old, scary.  When will the tides turn??  Will they??  Do I want to know??