Hi!
So.
It's been a long time, LJ.
A long time.
New Year's Day, 2010 was my last post. As most of you recall - actually, I don't think many of you do, since it's been that long ago and I wasn't posting a lot - 2009 was a shitty year for me. I had been dating a wonderful girl from work back in 2008, but I didn't have a job the entire year, which meant that I couldn't go out and do things, and if my girlfriend wanted to see me and do stuff with me, I either had to get money from my mom (who is the best mom in the world, seriously, but whose money reserves were not infinite) or let her pay (which was a blow to my ego), and neither of those options let us see each other as often as we would have liked. This was a tremendous strain on our relationship, so much so that sometimes she felt she was not in a relationship at all - there would be times that, due to me not having a cell phone with unlimited usage (the one I had was prepaid, so I used the minutes sparingly), we would go weeks without speaking. There is no word in the English language to describe how deeply this hurt both of us. I will sum up by saying that only our complete and utter devotion and faith in our relationship got us through this rough time.
In April of 2010, though, things got better. I got a call for a desk job with the U.S. Census (and met some new and amazing friends, all of who are totally cool and rad). It was only supposed to be for 6 to 8 weeks, and it turned into 4 months, because of how many times we had to count, recount, re-recount, and re-re-recount all the homes to make sure people were counted as accurately as humanly possible. I felt a great sense of pride, and doing my civic duty, and getting paid for doing so for $8.75 an hour was not too shabby. Hell, I would have done it for minimum wage because I was so thrilled just to have anything.
During this time, I moved in with my girlfriend, because her house was significantly closer to where the Census office was than my own house was. She had plenty of room (her house had an extra bedroom in it, and due to certain circumstances it became mine). It was definitely a strange transition, from "loser still living at home with his mom at 30" to "average guy moving in with his girlfriend and being responsible", but I've come out a better person for it, and my girlfriend knows this and I'm nothing but grateful to her for it. I gave up smoking for her, too, partly because she's asthmatic and partly because she just can't stand the smell of smoke on me. I smoked at work, but never at the house. I eventually stopped smoking at work. It was...hard. It still is. There are days that I want so badly to just walk into a store and buy a pack of cigarettes and chain smoke every last one of them, but I resist.
But the job, like all good things, came to an end in the latter part of August. I was surprised it lasted that long, because I was thinking June at the latest, but I took every day I could get, and when the time came that we were all let go (the non-essential staff, at least), we weren't too unhappy about it. Things started to get a bit more strained, because with both of our incomes we were able to pay our bills and still eat, but without mine we were having to choose. We borrowed money from my mom, again, on the order of a couple hundred for the lights or the rent here and there, but we both knew that we couldn't keep it up.
Then, in November, our luck turned for the better again, and I got another job working - you guessed it - at a hotel doing night audit (which is where I am posting right now). I suppose it's my lot in life. Actually, the GF wants me to go back to school, and so do I, but I want to make sure we can afford it and that we won't have to take a second mortgage out on our cardboard box to pay for it first. I'm thinking once we get the car paid off (which should be in about 8 more months or so, give or take, and that'll be $250 a month more in our pockets), we can both take some classes and get a leg up in getting better jobs. She's a pharmacy tech, and while it pays alright, it's still in a retail position, which means she has to deal with customers getting rude and angry and hateful and yelling and all that and it stresses her out and gives her high blood pressure. She's taking medication for it, and it's actually gotten her blood pressure in good shape, but it would still be better if she didn't have so much stress, so she's wanting to do something else that would be a bit more laidback. As for me, I can't complain about this job - the pay sucks, but it's steady work, and it's probably the easiest job I've ever had in my life.
We've gotten into a good routine now, too. She works afternoons, so it's on me to cook dinner (she almost always gets off at 9:30, so she comes right home, we eat and talk for about half an hour, then it's time for me to get ready for work). We don't see each other as often as we'd like, though, since I'm in bed before she gets up in the morning and I don't get up until after she leaves in the afternoon, but we're willing to sacrifice our time together to make sure we can both get to work and back and have a roof over our heads and food in our and our dogs' bellies.
Speaking of dogs, we have two little terriers, Monkey the Yorkie (who she's had since he was a puppy, and he'll be 4 next month. His mother's name was Mocha and his father's name was Reese, so his full name is Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey) and Merlin the Westie (who's more or less mine, and a rescue - he was salvaged from an unloving home by a coworker of my girlfriend, and it was either us or the shelter. I don't know if our shelter is a no-kill one or not. I don't want to have to find out.) He's such a sweet dog, and we think he's about 6 or 7, but he's a bit of a galoot. Sometimes he's more trouble than he's worth, but he's definitely our dog now and we wouldn't trade him for all the tea in China. We're using them as surrogate children, since we're pretty sure we'll never be able to have kids of our own (without going into too much graphic detail, her time of the month is every day. We've looked it up on the internet, and we're thinking it's endometriosis. Basically, her uterus keeps forming tissue on a daily basis, instead of once a month, so this extra tissue needs to keep being shed. It causes her immense pain and internal scarring from the constant blood loss, so she's more than likely infertile, and she's lost all libido anyway. We won't know for sure until she gets some more tests done, but she's only recently been able to get to the clinic downtown, and for some reason they've been more concerned about her high blood pressure. I'm no doctor, but I kinda think "bleeding every day" should take higher precedence than "moderately high blood pressure due to stressful job". But I digress).
We did have another dog, Maggie, who was a rescue like Merlin (in fact, they were brother and sister, although not from the same litter, since she was at least 11), but she, like all animals (and people) came to the end of her life about a month ago. She had been ill for about two months when she went, and we can only take comfort knowing that she's no longer the old Maggie that was going blind and senile, but the same Maggie we knew and loved before she got sick. (Not that we loved her any less, but it was heartbreaking to see her standing and staring at the walls for hours, drooling and not responding when we called her). We know in our hearts that she is waiting for us at the Rainbow Bridge, and we will see her again someday.
So yeah. Things are going pretty decently now. We paid my mom back when we got our taxes back, and got us some nice things - I got a 360 with a Kinect (which sit, barely used, since I can't seem to shake my WoW habit), she got a nice new vacuum and carpet cleaner. We play games, and watch Netflix (she gets a bunch of TV shows delivered, and watches a lot more streaming on the Wii. I seriously haven't played it since she started doing that. No loss; all my Wii games were crap, anyway.)We're not rich, by any means, but we get by. It'd be nice to do more than that, but with the way things are going, we're doing as well as we can. We love each other very much, and we'll get married someday (when we can afford a wedding at the beach), and money can't buy that.
It's been a long time, LJ.
A long time.
New Year's Day, 2010 was my last post. As most of you recall - actually, I don't think many of you do, since it's been that long ago and I wasn't posting a lot - 2009 was a shitty year for me. I had been dating a wonderful girl from work back in 2008, but I didn't have a job the entire year, which meant that I couldn't go out and do things, and if my girlfriend wanted to see me and do stuff with me, I either had to get money from my mom (who is the best mom in the world, seriously, but whose money reserves were not infinite) or let her pay (which was a blow to my ego), and neither of those options let us see each other as often as we would have liked. This was a tremendous strain on our relationship, so much so that sometimes she felt she was not in a relationship at all - there would be times that, due to me not having a cell phone with unlimited usage (the one I had was prepaid, so I used the minutes sparingly), we would go weeks without speaking. There is no word in the English language to describe how deeply this hurt both of us. I will sum up by saying that only our complete and utter devotion and faith in our relationship got us through this rough time.
In April of 2010, though, things got better. I got a call for a desk job with the U.S. Census (and met some new and amazing friends, all of who are totally cool and rad). It was only supposed to be for 6 to 8 weeks, and it turned into 4 months, because of how many times we had to count, recount, re-recount, and re-re-recount all the homes to make sure people were counted as accurately as humanly possible. I felt a great sense of pride, and doing my civic duty, and getting paid for doing so for $8.75 an hour was not too shabby. Hell, I would have done it for minimum wage because I was so thrilled just to have anything.
During this time, I moved in with my girlfriend, because her house was significantly closer to where the Census office was than my own house was. She had plenty of room (her house had an extra bedroom in it, and due to certain circumstances it became mine). It was definitely a strange transition, from "loser still living at home with his mom at 30" to "average guy moving in with his girlfriend and being responsible", but I've come out a better person for it, and my girlfriend knows this and I'm nothing but grateful to her for it. I gave up smoking for her, too, partly because she's asthmatic and partly because she just can't stand the smell of smoke on me. I smoked at work, but never at the house. I eventually stopped smoking at work. It was...hard. It still is. There are days that I want so badly to just walk into a store and buy a pack of cigarettes and chain smoke every last one of them, but I resist.
But the job, like all good things, came to an end in the latter part of August. I was surprised it lasted that long, because I was thinking June at the latest, but I took every day I could get, and when the time came that we were all let go (the non-essential staff, at least), we weren't too unhappy about it. Things started to get a bit more strained, because with both of our incomes we were able to pay our bills and still eat, but without mine we were having to choose. We borrowed money from my mom, again, on the order of a couple hundred for the lights or the rent here and there, but we both knew that we couldn't keep it up.
Then, in November, our luck turned for the better again, and I got another job working - you guessed it - at a hotel doing night audit (which is where I am posting right now). I suppose it's my lot in life. Actually, the GF wants me to go back to school, and so do I, but I want to make sure we can afford it and that we won't have to take a second mortgage out on our cardboard box to pay for it first. I'm thinking once we get the car paid off (which should be in about 8 more months or so, give or take, and that'll be $250 a month more in our pockets), we can both take some classes and get a leg up in getting better jobs. She's a pharmacy tech, and while it pays alright, it's still in a retail position, which means she has to deal with customers getting rude and angry and hateful and yelling and all that and it stresses her out and gives her high blood pressure. She's taking medication for it, and it's actually gotten her blood pressure in good shape, but it would still be better if she didn't have so much stress, so she's wanting to do something else that would be a bit more laidback. As for me, I can't complain about this job - the pay sucks, but it's steady work, and it's probably the easiest job I've ever had in my life.
We've gotten into a good routine now, too. She works afternoons, so it's on me to cook dinner (she almost always gets off at 9:30, so she comes right home, we eat and talk for about half an hour, then it's time for me to get ready for work). We don't see each other as often as we'd like, though, since I'm in bed before she gets up in the morning and I don't get up until after she leaves in the afternoon, but we're willing to sacrifice our time together to make sure we can both get to work and back and have a roof over our heads and food in our and our dogs' bellies.
Speaking of dogs, we have two little terriers, Monkey the Yorkie (who she's had since he was a puppy, and he'll be 4 next month. His mother's name was Mocha and his father's name was Reese, so his full name is Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey) and Merlin the Westie (who's more or less mine, and a rescue - he was salvaged from an unloving home by a coworker of my girlfriend, and it was either us or the shelter. I don't know if our shelter is a no-kill one or not. I don't want to have to find out.) He's such a sweet dog, and we think he's about 6 or 7, but he's a bit of a galoot. Sometimes he's more trouble than he's worth, but he's definitely our dog now and we wouldn't trade him for all the tea in China. We're using them as surrogate children, since we're pretty sure we'll never be able to have kids of our own (without going into too much graphic detail, her time of the month is every day. We've looked it up on the internet, and we're thinking it's endometriosis. Basically, her uterus keeps forming tissue on a daily basis, instead of once a month, so this extra tissue needs to keep being shed. It causes her immense pain and internal scarring from the constant blood loss, so she's more than likely infertile, and she's lost all libido anyway. We won't know for sure until she gets some more tests done, but she's only recently been able to get to the clinic downtown, and for some reason they've been more concerned about her high blood pressure. I'm no doctor, but I kinda think "bleeding every day" should take higher precedence than "moderately high blood pressure due to stressful job". But I digress).
We did have another dog, Maggie, who was a rescue like Merlin (in fact, they were brother and sister, although not from the same litter, since she was at least 11), but she, like all animals (and people) came to the end of her life about a month ago. She had been ill for about two months when she went, and we can only take comfort knowing that she's no longer the old Maggie that was going blind and senile, but the same Maggie we knew and loved before she got sick. (Not that we loved her any less, but it was heartbreaking to see her standing and staring at the walls for hours, drooling and not responding when we called her). We know in our hearts that she is waiting for us at the Rainbow Bridge, and we will see her again someday.
So yeah. Things are going pretty decently now. We paid my mom back when we got our taxes back, and got us some nice things - I got a 360 with a Kinect (which sit, barely used, since I can't seem to shake my WoW habit), she got a nice new vacuum and carpet cleaner. We play games, and watch Netflix (she gets a bunch of TV shows delivered, and watches a lot more streaming on the Wii. I seriously haven't played it since she started doing that. No loss; all my Wii games were crap, anyway.)We're not rich, by any means, but we get by. It'd be nice to do more than that, but with the way things are going, we're doing as well as we can. We love each other very much, and we'll get married someday (when we can afford a wedding at the beach), and money can't buy that.