Saturday, February 13, 2010

Got sidetracked....again.

I was doing pretty well there in November with the whole working out regimen, really getting back into it. That's when all the drama began and I got side tracked. We had to sell, move, settle and create a new plan for ourselves (which we are still working on). Oh, but I can get my head in the right place, really get focused if I start working out again. It always puts me in the right frame of mind. Oh, but where oh where are those damn workout shoe? "Honey, where are my workout shoes that were in the garage at the old house?" "I thought all those shoes were trash, so that's where they wound up!"

Please don't ask me to make sense of this man's logic because that is a futile task, after all, none of the soccer shoes that belong to him and his daughter had to make that perilous journey in those Waste Management containers, no, they made it safely to the new garage.

But, I digress, not a big deal, just go buy new ones, right? Right!

So after many days of watching it rain and rain and rain some more, I headed out to rid myself of the last excuse I could muster for being a lazy ass. I found the right shoes and was positive that I picked the right size, so why bother trying them on?

The next morning I put them on planning to run with my dog, but as soon as the last bow was tied, it was obvious that they were too big. Damnit, why do I always do stuff like this?

No worries, go out and get the right size. It was an easy task and I even found the right insole inserts that I use in all my athletic shoes.

The very next day, I feel a little tired but there is much shopping to do for it is Super Bowl weekend! Get the chips, dip, beer, snacks and all the fixings for that new pork pozole recipe I want to try. The whole family was in it together on this junk food excursion and as we walked up and down each aisle, I could no longer pretend my body aches and overall fatigue were an anomaly, I was getting sick! Really, I mean really? As I lay there in bed, looking across the room at the new Avias, looking at me with disdain, I felt defeated and they knew it! Oh God, I'm hallucinating, I must have a fever!

It only took a few days for me to realize that this was not a little bug so just to be sure I went to Urgent Care.

"Pneumonia!" said the doc. "And not to scare you or anything but Jim Henson, Bernie Mac and Brittany Murphy just died form it so be careful!" " Great", thanks doc! So he loaded me up on meds. It was all I could do just to walk downstairs and get a drink without feeling I had just ran a mile. The next day the weakness in my arms was so that I could not even play with my iTouch, which was really bothersome since I decided to obsess about dying like all those fallen celebrities. I needed to look up the facts on the celebrity deaths so I knew what was happening when my body decided to succumb to this sneaky little bastard that we call pneumonia. If a celebrity could die from pneumonia then I most assuredly, would die as well!

Never mind the fact that, there was more to their stories than was widely known but facts don't help when you are trying to obsess, they just get int he way and make you sane. Which is exactly what the second doctor told me on my follow up appointment. You'll be fine, just take your meds and rest and...come back in a week ...if you're not dead already! OK, He didn't really say that....but I know he wanted to...

I feel uneasy, as those shoes keep staring at me, just like that G&%#mn Geico stack of cash with the googly eyes!

Monday, February 1, 2010

Changes...

Moving sucks! Although, it is exciting too, bittersweet would be more accurate, in our case anyway. We did move on December 30th, which made for lots of chaos. Christmas this year was the abridged version, as was New Years. It rained on moving day. Apropos of something I guess. Maybe it was symbolic of a clean start, washing away the troubles of the past...ha, or maybe it was just rain!

We had so much stuff to move after ten years of living in the same place and watching our kids grow out of diapers, tricycles, cribs, pink walls in the bedroom, Dora and High School Musical. Now they have grown into cell phones, iPods, Wii, "Secret Life of the American Teenager", makeup, and little girls texting my son at 7 am. The house we are currently renting is much smaller than the old house so there was and still is, a lot to purge. Its funny that the more house you have the greater the need to fill it. We are streamlining our lives in this process and realizing that owning a house is not the key to our happiness.

We held onto that "American Dream" so tight that it came close to being our demise. Don't get me wrong, we contemplated selling many times over the past few years, ultimately believing that is was the wrong thing to do. We bought into the fantasy. Owning that house never felt like a dream, it felt more like a drain and I didn't realize it until we were out. It felt as the entire weight of that place was lifted off of our backs. When things got bad, a friend of mine said to me, " You have to think of this as a business decision and take the emotion out of it." In that moment, I realized she was right. She was an objective observer and she helped me see that the hope for the family's future did not lie in those four walls but in the strength that had held us all together over all the years of struggle. I called the real estate agent 5 minutes later. I am forever grateful to her for that little kick in the ass.

I was sad, we were all sad but knew that we had to move on. The kids were troopers. They were initially brokenhearted but they quickly recovered when they felt the strain lift. They saw how life could be when we all weren't cowering every time the phone rang or someone knocked on the door.

It felt good to write those checks to those family members who helped when they were able. To pay off so many things that I could never envision doing before.

It's time to reevaluate what exactly the next step will be. Hopefully this give us a chance to be clear headed and make choices. Choices that come from the pursuit of happiness and not from desperation.