7 Months Later…

I haven’t updated here in a long while. Long story short, we lost the baby in early January. Most of my time has been spent dealing with grief in my other blog, so I’m not going to bring that over to this site (other than this one lil’ post).

My life is slowly getting back to normal, like  I’m trying to lose weight so I can fit back into my favorite pair of jeans. I’m so tantalizingly close, that sometimes I think I’ve reached it. And then other times, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to wear those jeans again.

Since that point, I’ve taken a three week writing class, testified before the Texas Senate, and seemingly grew a pair of balls out of nowhere.

I have lots of things to share, but I feel like I just needed to get this out of the way first.

There’s no eloquent way to do this, so I’m just going to hit submit on this and let it be.

 

My Own Personal Hell: Stockpiling

A few years ago, when Gregg and I had just bought the house and were saving up money for the wedding in Scotland, we started couponing. It started out as just maximizing the CVS Extra Care Bucks, but after Gregg lost his job, we started down the dark, unholy path of using coupons to stockpile. Now, stockpiling somethings is just fine: at one point, we had 42 tubes of toothpaste that we had gotten for free. We used every single drop of that toothpaste. I am proud of that.

My pantry, however, is something that I am *not* proud of.

It started out innocently enough, but it soon turned into a nightmare of boxed goods. It was too much. Gregg and I aren’t preparing for the end of the world, economic collapse, or hosting the Duggars anytime soon, so it didn’t really make sense why we had 14 boxes of cereal, but we didn’t care. We were running on a savings high, elated over how much money we saved. We even made a game out of checking out: we both estimated how much the total bill would be.

It wasn’t an easy task: Gregg would spend Saturday night planning the purchases and we’d cut coupons. Then, Sunday morning, we’d wake up early to try and beat the scammers (people actually try to abuse the coupon policy to get the biggest and baddest deals only to sell them at a flea market or on eBay. Seriously. I can’t make this up.) We’d usually hit CVS first, because those were the deals that went the fastest. Planning the grocery stores was a bit more complicated. We’d go to Kroger and Randalls, but we had to plan out which one we were going to first based on the grocery list. We did this all in one trip, so we had to be careful about cold items in the car when making multiple stops.

But most of the “food” we were buying was crap: heavily processed, powdered, and full of preservatives. It was convenient, sure, and at that point, we were all about convenience. We didn’t buy products that we didn’t eat, for example, we learned early on that Healthy Choice meals were about as enjoyable as its cardboard packaging. Yuck.

Eventually, we learned that even though we were saving money, we were technically wasting money because we couldn’t eat fast enough before the food expired. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to admit defeat and clean the pantry; it would have been too painful to see all the food that went to waste in one, large pile.

So, it stayed in the pantry. Until last Friday, when I cleaned it all out. Not in one go, oh, no. It was a three-week process, taking up more than six garbage cans. We had been stockpiling since 2009, according to the expiry date. I couldn’t do it all in one go, besides, I was embarrassed for the garbage men to see how wasteful we were, so we had to do it in chunks.

We still have a few things that need to be thrown away, but for the most part, my pantry is clean.

It was a hard lesson, but one that I think we learned quickly.

Although I still want to go back to CVS. I need toothpaste.

Nature versus Demeanor

When I was in college, I used to role play – D&D, White Wolf, etc. So last year, I incorporated some gaming elements into my classroom to try and motivate my students to to a bit more. I found myself creating a WOD character sheet, complete with Nature and Demeanor.

For my readers who aren’t familiar with this gaming concept (Mom), there are basically archetypes of personality. You nature is who you really are, the real you, the you that you guard carefully. Your demeanor is what you present to people.

We talk about how your Demeanor will change depending on the situation and who and what you are faced with, but most of the time, I am usually a jester. My nature is an architect.

Sometimes having that demeanor is difficult – people don’t always take you seriously, people don’t expect you to get upset, and worst of all, they expect you to be a jester at all times.

It’s hard to maintain that demeanor, especially when going through stressful situations. Even people who know my nature aren’t comfortable with the non-Jester Vanessa. I hear (or imagine that I hear): This isn’t you. This isn’t the girl that I married. You’ll be back to normal in no time.

It’s just easier to slink away and play Solitaire on my phone. That way, I’m quiet, unobtrusive, and it staves off the tears.

I wouldn’t say that I’m depressed – I would use the word grieving. And not the normal grieving, either – an emotional yo-yo of hope and sucker punches to the stomach.

I usually have a breaking point, cry, and reach out, but afterwards comes the embarrassment. I hate sucking people into my drama, making them feel bad – there is nothing they can do for me, so why tell them? They can’t give me any advice, they can’t console me, and they certainly make me feel any better. Either I’m working myself up for disappointment, or I need to have more hope and not give up so easily. There’s no happy medium between the two, at least none that I’ve found.

Even posting this blog feels like attention whoring. So I trudge on, week by week. It seems easier to take things a week at a time – day by day just gets too long – I start looking at the days until next month. Weeks are easier for me. I keep myself busy cleaning, baking, making doctor appointments, but there is always that nagging headache in the back of my mind, and if I let my guard down or pause for too long, or get shocked into emotion, it’s back like a migraine.

Let’s see how I feel after yoga.

Meet my cats. No, really

This is Megan. She is an adorable, ten year old Manx. I think angels classified as a “rumpy riser,” as evidenced by the next picture.

Oh, and she only had one eye. She lost that a few years ago. The very seemed to think she had punctured it either in an accident or rough horse (cat?) play. She likes to talk back to you, play fetch, and have her eye socket rubbed. She does not like the outdoors, car rides, or having her butt cleaned when she has dingles, or even worse – accidents.

She is compact, but very small, even though you can’t tell at first glance.

She is very protective of the house and will grow when the doorbell rings. She is a force to be reckoned with when she puffs up in anger, though most don’t take her too seriously.

She thinks bandanas are fashionable, and who am I to argue otherwise?

I’ll introduce Elizabeth tomorrow.

Summer

Kurdish
Backtrack fresh steak
tho junk edin fun, krebs inc junk
tests  west fresh feeds
stock games
mighty kgb
Showgirl reckon return

Posted from WordPress for Android, so please be mindful of typos, please!

Test

Testing my new phone.

Sipping on gin and juice…

Well, I will be, come May. I am applying for graduation today, and I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if I am going to walk across that stage with Lamar. I don’t want to drive down there and I don’t want to give them anymore money than I have to and I don’t want to be on that campus unless I am forced to (i.e. comp exams).

While everyone else is dressed up in pomp and circumstance, I will be in my backyard, comfortably drinking a beer with my friends, relaxing by the pond. That sounds better to me than getting cattled around with a bunch of strangers just to be handed a piece of paper by incompetent jackholes.

All I have left to do is my comp exam and finish my last class, which consists of a reflexive paper. I can do that. I can write a paper till my fingers bleed. I think I’m at about page 7 right now. I expect that I’ll be somewhere around 20 by the end of the week.

In other news, my bedroom and bathrooms are spotless. I love it. My laundry is clean and folded and hung. Tonight I’m going to work on the living room and kitchen. I feel so… domestic. I love having a clean house. Makes me feel so, warm and fuzzy inside. Like Megan.

Twiddles and Twaddles

I have eight more days of waking up early until winter break. That, I can handle.

Stuck doing lots of laundry. I have a bad tendency to procrastinate chores I hate, and while I don’t mind washing clothes, I HATE folding clothes. You now see my problem. I wish I had enough money to drop my laundry off at a pay site in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon ready to put put away. I can dream, can’t I?

I love school right now. I love teaching. I actually even like my Lamar class (and my academic coach) this session.

In other news, it snowed in Houston again last Friday. And it was a real snow, too. Not the dinky flurries we normally get. I’ve seen snow once a year for the past few years now. Kinda cool. Don’t really miss it all that much, but I would like to maybe throw a *real* snowball at Gregg one of these days.

No real plans for Christmas. Just keeping my fingers crossed that Gregg gets a job. Think maybe I’ll try and paint a room. Maybe get the upstairs rooms organized and cleared. Well, at least my book room. I’m not touching Gregg’s “computer lab”.

Gregg’s been volunteering his time to help out friends with their computer issues – an old co-worker of his, two teachers I work with – and refusing to take any money from them. He says he’s trying to get experience and references for his resume (which he is), but I think he’s genuinely happy that he’s helping people.

I know the warning signs…

For me, it’s sleeping a lot and loss of appetite. The anxiety over nothing. I’ve hit the doldrums.

The darkness doesn’t help. I sleep when it turns dark – it’s my internal clock. And it gets dark early these days. I could fall asleep right now if I let myself.

It just seems like everything is a fight lately. Lamar. School board. Computers. Students. The house.

I’m tired of fighting. I want someone else (who’s more effective than me) to pick it up.

Just because I know how to recognize them, however, does not mean that I know how to shake them. Let’s see if the gym can’t shake these buggers off.

Thrift Store Adventure!

Mom’s in town right now, and today, we are embarking on a 12 store run in and around Houston today. God, I love Google maps. We’re starting down in Pasadena and just working our way back up 45. We’re skipping a lot, but I think this will keep us busy for the entire day. I just hope we skip rush hour – I kind of forget about things like that when I’m on vacation.

Gregg got the dining room set all taken care of, and I immediately littered it with china and chargers! It’s beautiful! Unfortunately, the mustard wall color is a little distracting, but I still don’t know what to do about all that stupid painted over wallpaper applied directly on the wallboard. Daud suggested that we just replace all of the drywall, but that scares the crap out of me. I was thinking maybe I’ll just try to paint over it for a little while, but that just seems like a waste of time.

Had an estimate to replace the windows – we really want to do it all at one time, but Gregg’s still on the job hunt, so we had him give it to us in three sections: 1. All upstairs; 2. The eight giants windows downstairs; and 3. The rest of the downstairs windows. I think we are just going to wait and see what happens when Gregg gets a job – the large 8 windows were a little cost prohibitive right now, and I don’t really want to compromise with those since we’ll be losing some of the pond view if we go the cheaper route.

Speaking of the pond, Gregg and Daud have started to cement it. But it’s going to take a lot more cement than they originally thought. It looks really, really nice though. Gregg needs to take a few pictures for posterity.

I’m nearing the halfway point with my portfolio – I think I’m making pretty good progress on it right now. I only have three entries left for my course embedded hours, and then I have to start working on my campus supervised hours. I just wish that I knew what I was doing. Since I started my portfolio so late (thanks to Lamar, we got it almost a year after we started the first class), I had to log fewer hours than everyone else in in the program, but I don’t have any confirmation that I am still on that plan. They have also added and changed elements of the portfolio that I have not heard anything about, because I was not an “official” student. My current course instructor is not familiar with portfolios since he’s involved with teachers leadership and not administration, and I really hesitate e-mailing Lamar for any assistance or help at this point.

Yes, HL e-mailed me an apology, but Carolyn Crawford has not sent me anything. No apology. No explanation. No “whoops”. Nothing.

I’ve been talking with a few other people who have gone through this program, and realized that if this is all that I have had to deal with, I’m pretty lucky. Even though I have gotten this far, I won’t consider anything to be a victory until I have that degree conferred and I see a pay increase in my salary.

I bought a 20lb. turkey for about 5 bucks the other day! Thank God Mom is here, because I’d have no idea what to do with it if she weren’t. I would love to deep fry a turkey, but I think I’ll go traditional this time around. Next year, maybe I’ll go the deep fried route.