Never Broken

I feel beaten. So hurt, so angry… broken.

There are moments when I want to throw my hands up. I really want to not care so much. If only there was a switch to turn off my mind. To stop caring so fucking much.

But I will not be broken. I refuse.

I am nothing if not strong. So no matter how hurt I feel I won’t give up. I’m extremely stubborn.

I know what is worth fighting for…

But is all this fighting even going to get me anywhere? I have to believe it will.

Otherwise I’m just a stubborn fool.

That’s also possible… but I hope not.

No time

It’s been so long since I truly didn’t have time for things. No time to read books I want to read. No time to catch up on my shows. No time to read and comment on all the blogs that I love.

No time.

Well, ok not no time. But I would have to give up other things. Like spending time with friends. Or sleeping.

Those are things that I’m not giving up.

So for all intents and purposes, I have no time.

It’s weird for me.

I can’t remember a time in my life when I had no time. In The Netherlands I had plenty of time for internet and books and shows. Obviously the kids kept me busy but I always had evenings free plus three days off a week. Then I had basically part time jobs until I got a job as a flight attendant.

As a flight attendant? It felt like I had nothing but spare time. I spent a ton of time “working” but let’s face it, even on the airplane I had time to sit and read a book or whatever.

Then there were layovers. Often on my layovers I went out and explored the town or hung out with coworkers. I wanted to soak in every second of that job. However, if you’re staying in an airport hotel with nothing around for the 8th time in 2 months…. you run out of things to do outside your hotel room so it leaves plenty of time for books and blogs.

Add into that having 11 guaranteed days off a month plus not flying every single day I was on call? Sometimes I felt like the laziest person alive. I wasn’t.

Until I got furloughed. Then I was definitely the laziest person alive. I would go days without ever seeing the outdoors. Pajamas were my uniform and I would find myself on Hulu watching absolute crap because I had no more blogs to read or shows to watch.

Really truly pathetic.

Now I have this job. And I. love. it. It keeps me on my toes and challenges me. There are always problems to solve and when I turn a near disaster into a success? Well, there’s nothing quite like the rush it gives me.

But, I’m left with a choice between reading a book that I really love (or at least I really love so far. I’ve barely begun it) or sleep? I’m probably going to choose sleep.

And when I say probably I mean pretty definitely.

I love sleep. We’ve established this.

What I’m trying to say is, I’m an awful blog friend lately. I barely even check Twitter anymore, much less post. I read as many blog posts as I can but I rarely comment. I hate that. I have things to say, really, I just am trying to squeeze as much into a short period of time as possible.

So I’m totally lame and have no time to do a lot of the things that I’ve loved and gotten used to over the past couple of years. I think it’s probably a good thing. I haven’t felt this fulfilled since I stopped flying. I certainly have never felt this productive, possibly ever.

I’m sure a balance will come soon. Already things run a million times smoother than they did before. Until then I’ll treasure ever second of sleep and down time I get.

Speaking of sleep, I have a nice warm bed and handsome husband calling my name right now.

I really should stay out of the kitchen

I’m pretty sure I should give up on the idea of cooking. Ever.

I understand that it’s not uncommon to get injured while cooking. People get cuts and burns all the time. Sometimes the injuries are even fairly serious. Thankfully my injuries have stayed out of the, trip to the hospital, variety. They’ve also stayed out of the, oh yeah everyone’s done that, variety. In fact, they’re generally down right embarrassing. Honestly, I’m not sure it’s my fault though.

Kitchen appliances are out to get me.

Remember when the hand mixer tried to take my hand off? Absolutely ridiculous right? I mean, I didn’t even know it was possible to get your hand crushed by a hand mixer. Who knew it’s name could be taken so literally? Seriously, who does that?

Actually, there was one other person on twitter who said the same thing had happened to them. That’s the brilliant thing about twitter. You can always find someone who has had at least a similar, if not the same, experience as you. Makes me feel much less alone.

It does not, however, make me feel any less stupid.

Last night someone ordered one of our hand made sodas. It’s lemon basil flavored and is actually quite good. It’s really refreshing and just a little different. Kind of neat twist on a lemonade. We make our own ingredients at the store and mix it as it’s ordered.

I told them no problem, had them sit down and went to the fridge to grab the ingredients. I found the basil syrup but we were completely out of lemon juice.

Crap.

Thankfully I work at a grocery store so I just had to run to the produce section to get lemons. I thought I’d speed things up (and waste less juice) by grabbing the lemon juicer from the kitchen. I was obviously in a big hurry since the customer was just sitting around waiting for their drink.

We have two lemon juicers at work, one that’s a little hand juicer like you’d by at the grocery store. The other is a heavy, commercial juicer. Which one do you think I chose?

It looks very much like this one.

I rushed back over to my cafe area and started cutting and juicing the lemons. I only needed a few lemons so I was slicing and squeezing at a very rapid pace. I stuck half in the juicing area, pulled down the lever, pushed it back up, tossed the juiceless lemon and cut another. I had a nice little rhythm going.

What I didn’t realize was:

1. That lever is quite heavy.

2. I’m just the right height that the lever is eye level.

3. Gravity likes to bring heavy things down at a rapid pace, especially when you’re in a hurry and aren’t being careful to make sure said heavy thing is locked in an upright position.

Next thing I knew I was reaching to cut a lemon when that stupid heavy lever slammed down right into my nose.

Ugh.

As with any nose injury my eye immediately teared up. Unluckily for me my coworker (who was off work at the time) was sitting at the counter watching the whole thing. He, of course, thought it was hilarious.

That made me less annoyed at the blinding pain in my nose.*

I was in too much of a hurry to really react though so I just said ow and went on with my day. I was a little terrified that I’d end up with two black eyes and a bruised nose. Wouldn’t that have been fun to explain. At least I had a witness?

Thankfully so far I only have a little red mark on my nose. It hasn’t turned into a big ugly bruise yet. It definitely feels like it should be black and blue, especially if I accidentally make any kind of contact with it. But so far it’s nothing that can’t be easily covered up with a little foundation.

If it turns into something uglier I’m not sure how I’ll explain things. I might be tempted to say I got in a fist fight.

That’s way less embarrassing than saying I got beat up by a lemon juicer.

*sarcasm

Marital duties

I grew up in a household of eight. Eight. Do you even have any idea how many dishes eight people produce? Especially considering the fact that it was almost never just the eight of us. My siblings and I always had friends over so a dinner on any given evening could easily have a dozen people or more.

That makes for a lot of dirty dishes. In case you were wondering.

I hate doing the dishes for this reason. I had done more dishes by the time I turned 18 than some people do their entire lives.

Or at least it felt that way. I’m not a drama queen. Shut up.

When I was growing up I used to babysit for a family with three adorable kids. Their mom was young and became quite a good friend. I spent a lot of time with her. One thing she told me was when her and her husband got married they made a deal, she’d do the laundry if he’d do the dishes.

Even at 13 this plan seemed brilliant. I knew I would employee this whenever I finally got married myself. They were such an adorable happy couple* and my friend? Never had to do the dishes. Ever.

Brilliant.

When Joel and I were talking about getting married I pitched him on this plan. He did not seem convinced. Always having to do the dishes? Always? Just in exchange for laundry? Yeah, I wouldn’t have gone for it either.

So I upped the ante. “How about,” I said “I do all the housework. I’ll cook, clean, do laundry, everything. As long as I never have to do the dishes.”

He was sold.

That plan lasted a really long time. And by really long time I mean it lasted until the first time we had guest coming in ZOMGthey’llbehereintwentyminutesandthishouseissomessy!!!1!! and I politely asked made him help me clean the house.

I still did the laundry though. Eventually the deal became what I offered originally. Dishes are Joel’s chore and laundry is mine. This may or may not be partially because I am obsessive compulsive a little picky about how my clothes are washed. Also? Joel did manage to destroy several of my shirts in one load the first time I let him help me with the laundry. He says it wasn’t on purpose… but he almost never does the laundry anymore either. So I’ll let you be the judge.

Anyway, this weekend Joel was in Memphis at a conference. Luckily(?) I had the plague and basically didn’t eat** for two of the four days he was gone. I did have cereal Sunday morning and ate some dinner and things though.

Today I realized Joel was going to be home soon and, even though “his” job is the dishes, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count when he hasn’t contributed to them in four days. So, I did the dishes this evening before Joel got back because I am a fabulous wife like that.

Side note: Did you know that milk, when left a day and a half in a bowl in the sink smells and looks just like yogurt? Gah! No wonder he gets annoyed when I don’t rinse it out in the morning.

There weren’t that many and it wasn’t a huge deal. But I was reminded today how much I appreciate having a husband that doesn’t mind doing the dishes all the time. There were a million other little things I missed about him while he was gone this weekend too. But the dishes were a big one.

I’m so happy he’s home.

*They did later get divorced. So maybe not the best marriage role models. At least their dishes plan worked out.

**I weighed myself Sunday after two days of hell. I lost 8 pounds. In two days. Yeah. I wasn’t kidding about feeling like I was dying.

No lie

The other day I was getting ready to leave the house. I was searching for a pair of my pants and couldn’t seem to find them anywhere. You’d think it would be strange for me to have a hard time finding a pair of pants but unfortunately it’s a fairly common occurrence around my house.

See, right now my clothing situation is a bit of a disaster. I have plenty of clothes (Joel says too many, I say he’s crazy, you can never have too many clothes) but when we moved we went from a big beautiful walk-in closet to a normal sized regular closet. Waaaah! Sad right?

So, since we moved in July I’ve never quite gotten a handle on getting all my clothes organized and put away because I simply don’t have enough room for them all anymore. This means I often have piles of clothes all over my bedroom and sometimes the living room depending on if I’ve recently done laundry or not.

We were running slightly behind schedule (per usual) so I was getting a bit frantic searching for my missing pants. I had Joel looking as well and neither of us could find the stupid pair of pants anywhere. Not long ago I packed away all my summer clothes so in a moment of desperation I started digging through that box. I pulled out a rather large pile of stuff when suddenly Joel yelled that he found them. They were hanging in the closet. Go figure.

I grabbed them and ran into the other room to finish getting ready. I asked Joel if he’d please pick up that pile that I had just pulled out really fast so my packed away clothes didn’t get mixed up with the other piles in the room. He mumbled something that I assumed was an unenthusiastic yes and I didn’t think anything else of it.

We got out of the house mostly on time, went about our day and got home late that night. We began getting ready for bed when we started smelling the heater. It was a very sharp, hot, almost chemical smell. We have the kind of heaters that are low on the wall and heat up with water. I want to say they’re radiators but I’m not really an expert on that sort of thing. Anyway, they do get very hot. So hot in fact we often have to open windows sometimes so it stops feeling like a tropical rain forest. There’s not really a happy medium, they’re either set at sweltering or off.

We’re really careful to keep things away from the edges but the smell kept getting worse so Joel got down with a flashlight to see if he could find anything. He found a rubber band that had fallen into one of them but it didn’t seem to be hot or melted or what was causing the smell. To be safe we just turned the heat off and went to bed.

The next morning we got up and began to get ready. We still had the heat off from the night before. Weirdly we began smelling that same smell again. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when suddenly Joel ran in from the bedroom shouting about how he found where the smell was coming from with a smoking pile of clothes. He had been standing in the bedroom when all of the sudden he noticed little puffs of smoke coming from that pile of clothes I’d asked him to clean up.

Needless to say what I thought was a mumbled yes was really just a mumble about how he didn’t want to clean up my clothes. And he didn’t. What we both didn’t realize is the pile went high enough that a couple things were resting on the light bulb of an Ikea lamp in our room.

Apparently, those light bulbs get extremely hot.

Especially when covered in clothes.

Hot enough that this happened.

In case you can’t tell that’s what use to be two of my suits.

It burned a hole fully through five layers of suit material.

Here is the light bulb of doom.

See, normally this lamp would have had a fancy light shade over it. But we just replaced the burnt out bulbs and hadn’t gotten around to putting the shade back on.

Thankfully nothing more was hurt than a couple of suits I don’t ever wear anymore. I’m a little sad because one was the suit I got hired by my airline in. ::sniff:: However, I realize things could be much worse. I only just moved the dried flowers that had been sitting there a few days ago. We’re the kind of people who obsessively turn lights off when we leave a room. Had we left the house with that light on like that we might have come home to no house at all.

But no one was hurt so now it’s just a ridiculous story I get to tell.

Also? I had to get rid of some of the “too many” clothes Joel says I have. He says he definitely did not set fire to my clothes on purpose just so I’d get rid of some. But what’s that saying again?

Liar, liar, pants on…..

I’ll let you be the judge.