Monthly Archives: August 2012

The Year Still Starts In September

Posted in Life Ramblings, Projects by

A Ferris wheel at night.

It has arrived.  You can smell it in the hot, muggy air.  The end of summer is looming.  Sure, sure, the official end of summer doesn’t get here for another month.  The summer weather doesn’t even seem to be letting up.  But the fair has arrived, and I just finished my mini-doughnuts, and that means that the end is near, because summer REALLy ends when Labor Day rolls through and the First Day of School arrives, to the disdain of many children and the relief of many parents.

For the first time in two decades, this typically defining moment doesn’t really change anything for me… This year I’m not a student, and I’m not a teacher.  I could actually start thinking about life in terms of calendar years, and not school years.  But after twenty years of starting fresh in September, I just can’t give it up.  It’s my favorite time of the year.  Fresh notebooks and pens, drawing up new schedules I swear I’m actually going to stick to, feeling energized and ready to take on a new challenge…

So, in the spirit of starting fresh, the blog is getting a little renovation this week.  I’ve already begun, but I’m playing with the format, so if it’s kind of a mess this week, I promise it won’t be by next Tuesday!  I’m excited to get back to the day to day blogging that didn’t happen this summer and I’m looking forward to catching up on reading my favorite bloggers, and reaching out to new readers.

There are new adventures on my horizon.  I’m not totally sure what they are, but they’re coming, ready or not.  And you can read about them right here.

So lets soak up these last few sweet days of summer.  They’re almost gone!

The Things That Change And The Things That Don’t

Posted in Family, Life Ramblings, Relationships by

I wish I was starting this post with some major announcement that my path in life had been found and verified, and I was in the process of embarking on some great adventure… but alas, just more waiting.  Waiting for everything to change.

However, we did get three days at my parents, with amazing home cooked meals we didn’t have to plan, and my little sister and I celebrated our birthdays together again, like we always did as kids.  The cake? Disney Princess.  We do not believe in getting too old to celebrate in tiaras either.  In fact, not much has changed in 15 years… We’ve just upgraded the lemonade.

 

Yup, that is what we did on Saturday afternoon.  We went to lunch, we went to the local ice cream parlor, and then we came back and pulled out the bucket of sidewalk chalk my mom recently discovered when she was cleaning out the garage.  She was going to give it to the neighbor kids… It was a good thing she didn’t.  She would have missed out on our very impressive artwork.

“Of course your castle is all pretty and perfect, and mine is huge, pink and crazy with an alligator and a waterside,” my sister complained as we sipped our drinks and documented our undertaking with instagram.  Some things never change.

But truthfully a lot has changed… and in another 15 years,even more will have changed.  I can’t even imagine what our lives will look like then.  And yet, I can still see us on the driveway playing with sidewalk chalk.  Somehow, that’s incredibly comforting right now.

 

 

Having Faith

Posted in Faith, Inspiration, Life Ramblings, Marriage, Relationships by

I had all of these great blog posts in progress for this week.  I was excited to be able to get back to a schedule, back to writing being a set part of my day, both for my blog and to start a new big project.  I thought this week would be about finding some normalcy in all of the change.  But instead, everything changed… again.

On Friday I turned 26.  And let me admit, I had a pretty bad attitude about it.  I won’t go on about birthdays in general (although that was going to be my blog post for Monday) because by the early hours of Sunday morning, lying in the ER, I was just praying I’d see another one.  It started with recurring symptoms that had been going on for a while… I assumed they were stress related.  It’s been a pretty ridiculously stressful time.  But then it was different.  Then I couldn’t breathe, and the pain wouldn’t go away.  I had all of the symptoms of a heart attack, and as I struggled to breathe, my husband rushed me to the ER.

If you’re predicting the outcome, trust me, I was too.  People don’t usually have heart attacks at 26.  And I was stressed. Panic attack, right?  I was sure of it.  I remember enough from my days as a psych undergrad to know that despite the fact I was lazily watching “Bunheads” at the time, panic can manifest itself in a lot of scary with no immediate trigger.  That’s what the nurses assumed as they took my vitals.  It’s what the doctor assumed as she ordered tests to be sure.

Then my EKG came back.  The doctor told me that there was an inconsistency between the two they had done, and started drawing pictures of heart monitor lines.  It seemed that blood wasn’t flowing right to my heart.  I needed to be admitted.  Then she started throwing around words like “bypass” and “surgery” and if I wasn’t already panicking, that’s where it started.

I’ll skip the long recitation… By the next afternoon I still hadn’t slept and I was a mess.  The final consensus is that I have a heart abnormality, but there are no signs of damage.  The abnormality is probably exacerbated by the stress, and because my body doesn’t know what’s wrong, it panics, and presents as a heart attack.  They aren’t sure of this.  I could pay thousands of dollars to find out more… but they don’t know that they’d actually find out more.  And at that point all I wanted was to be at home, in my own bed. So I came home, with answers… but not really.

My husband and I agreed that I would take a few days off of frantically job searching and worrying about our impending homelessness, and instead, would try to somehow forget about the status of life right now.  I would rest.  We wouldn’t talk about anything important.

But that only lasted a few hours.  Because then came the call that COULD change everything… a job.  The kind he’s always wanted.  In a place we never considered living in.  A city much smaller than we planned on, near my hometown.  Could he be there this week?

It could be exactly what we’ve waited for.  At moments it seems like an answer to our prayers, like we’ve finally been through enough and it’s time to move on and start real life.  At other moments, I remember the downsides to small town life, something my husband has never experienced before, and which would be rude awakening to him.  I think of all the plans we had to stay here or to move to the city I lived in before this.  I had apartments picked out in each one.  We knew everything about them… My control freak side starts to panic.

But I’m trying to give that up to someone who knows better than I do, and to trust that what’s meant to happen will happen.  So when I stumbled across the sketch above (lets ignore it being a tattoo…) it resonated with me deeply.  We have to have faith.  So we pack up, and we head off to find out what God has in store for us.  This could just be another dead end.  Or it could be a new beginning.  I’m not sure which I’m rooting for right now… But I’ll let you know what happens.