Wow everyone…can you believe it? My blog is one year old today! Nope, I can’t believe it either. One year ago I was sitting at Julie A Lindsey‘s table talking about a book she had written that I had been reading for her. She told me I needed to give opinions for other aspiring authors, so I made myself a blog and started beta reading. That led to reviewing and that has led to here! Julie has now gone on to be a published author with books coming out next year…AND a 3 book deal! So much has happened over the year and I have read a ton of books. Some were so amazing I can still picture them in my head even now. Those are the best ones, the ones that play out like a movie inside my head. The ones I can see, hear and even smell. If a book can’t accomplish that then is simply another book…but for the ones that can, it’s magical.
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On top of the authors I have met a ton of super cool bloggers. Seriously, without their help my first year would have gone a a lot slower. They were always there to answer my questions and to help me out if I needed it. So I want to say thank you to Bellie, Smexy, Tori, Colette, Stacey, Tigris and Danielle! I’m sure I’m forgetting people too.
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These authors and bloggers are women I admire and feel fortunate to call friend. I am looking forward to the next year and I can’t wait to see what it will bring! Thank you so much to all the authors that have helped me celebrate my first year over this past month…thank you for believing in me and letting me into your minds for a short while, one book at a time.
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So if you’ve been wondering what all the guest posts and giveaways were about…well, now you know
As a thank you for the past year I wanted to have small giveaway! I will pick one random commenter from this post and they will get their choice of book from thebookdepository.com up to $10 in US money. This is open to anywhere that the book depository ships. I will leave it open until July 2nd and announce the winner on July 3rd. Please leave a way for me to contact you.
So my life, in a nutshell, is currently taking a nosedive spiral of death. That sounds bad I suppose. Not everything is bad, let me assure you, but I think my perception of a lot of things is skewed. You see, I think I would classify myself as a pessimist. I’m a glass half full, hurry up and run to the sink for a refill, type of girl. At this point in my little self portrait, the sink would run away from me screaming and I would flail behind it. Can you picture it? If I was an artist I would draw a picture, alas, I am not..so use your brains.
It’s been a month since I took over my new position here as the office bitch…errr manager at the complex I work for. A whole month. While my checkbook is rejoicing greatly at the vast improvement over the cobwebs and tumbleweeds that used to blow around in there, my personal life is in upheaval. I have zero time for ANYTHING. I would love to work out and that just ain’t happening. I would have to get up at 5am, and let’s face it, no. My self image is sufficiently lacking. I am not one of those, get stressed and lose 20 lbs girls. Oh no, I get stressed and I become Chris Farley in this skit:
I am having a horrible time getting back into the swing of this full time job world. We haven’t even had to utilize after school care yet because the husband has been on days and able to pick them up. I shudder to think of the stress I will face in having to be somewhere at a certain time in the evening since I never know what my afternoons are going to bring these days.
Couple this stress over getting into some sort of routine I have had some medical issues. I apparently have a reoccurring respiratory issue called pleurisy…which is all kinds of fun that requires steroids and painkillers. But I’m a much nicer person on painkillers so people didn’t seem to mind. In the span of a week I went from not being on any meds to being on four. I hate taking medicine. Mainly because they all seem to make me feel like crap and I can’t ever remember to take them. Taking medication is something I always forget. I think that may be the reason I have the almost 9 yr old (heh).
I’m sure you can tell from this post that I am frazzled. Tomorrow my mom is leaving for her move to Arizona. Yay! No. While I try not to make a big deal about it, I’m freaking out. FREAKING OUT I SAY! Mostly because the idea of not having anyone to watch my kids is awful. Now I’m going to have a find a sweet teenage babysitter. By the time my kids are done with her she’ll be trying to convince her parents she wants her tubes tied now. And daycare in the summer…that makes my wallet cry buckets of tears. That’s a lot of money I don’t have.
I heard my mom tell some tenant at the complex that I haven’t shown much in the way of emotions and I probably won’t. This is most likely true. However, let me assure you my poor husband gets a boatload of crazy from me daily. Especially as of lately. The other night I flipped out…like that movie Sybil…about something completely dumb. I was in a full out rage. Why? Stress? I’m sure at some point that day someone had set me off and I had bottled that up instead of exploding all over them only to release it all later on the unsuspecting husband.
Patience is not something I have in spades. I’m definitely better then I was 10 years ago. Infinitely so. However, it seems everyone else has gotten worse LOL. Everyone wants something and they want it RIGHT NOW. No waiting. Don’t bother telling them no, it won’t work. Give them what they or they are not happy. This does not bode well for my psyche. I am in need of some high strength nerve pills or someone may enter my office to find me curled in the fetal position under my desk with a river of tears streaming out from under it. The maintenance men will have to coax me out with chocolate. Or my kids will find that I’ve locked myself in the bathroom after their last fight over who get to sit on the left side of the couch. I will sit upon my tiled bathroom floor and rock myself while contemplating how I can pull off a disappearance into the setting sun. How much money does one need to run away to a deserted island? Only enough to get there right because if it’s deserted I won’t need anything when I reach it. Wonder how I could convince David Boreanaz to come with me….
See how my mind works? I can complain and then in the very next thought be thinking about David Boreanaz. It’s a virtual crazy mess in this brain of mine. Perhaps it’s my own version of self soothing. Babies use a pacifier or thumb and I use David LOL. Since I’ve been on the verge of a meltdown for the past month….tears always at the ready…Youtube knew this when I went looking for a video of the movie Falling Down to place in this post about my freaking out. It knew I’m on the edge of a sharp mental drop and it threw in a video of Buffy and Angel for me.
Thank you YouTube, you stopped the crazy train…or at least delayed it a few minutes.
Dear lord help me. The husband and I have been married 9 years this coming week and so I went and got us a family present to celebrate. We are not a “gaming” family by any means but we do have a Wii that we love to play. Well mainly we only play Mario Kart, I won’t lie.
I had been thinking of getting an Xbox for a while. I finally broke down and bought the stripped down version today. We all know how expensive these things are. So I being it home, get it out of the box, hook it up and the kids couldn’t care less. Well the girl cares a bit I guess. She bugged me incessantly while I hooked it up, then begged a bit more when I was trying out my new dancing game. So I finally said ok and popped in a kid game and she just stands there. Looking at me like this is a foreign concept. As if she has never played Wii before and this is her first time with a video game. So I try to help her along but she’s not listening to the cues from the game, moving too fast, well just, moving around altogether which causes the motion sensor thingie to not know what’s going on. This went on for about an hour before I get annoyed that she wasn’t listening to me OR the game and turned it off and sent her to bed.
I am not a very patient person. Though I am more so now that I’m nearly 30 with two kids….but geez. How much can one person take? “Mommy. what did it say?” “Mommy how do I do this?” Over and over again until I want to rip my ears off and throw them at her. Since we didn’t allow the kids to play video games until about a year ago, this is probably my fault. I see other kids playing just fine. Oh no…not mine.
The boy? What is he doing? Just sitting on the couch staring at me. You know, most kids would be jumping for joy. Not my kids. They just whine and moan and gripe. Sometimes being a parent SUCKS. I guess I need to open the violent game to play when I want to scream. The one I bought for kicks after the kids go to bed. The one where I get to run people over in a car LOL. GREAT stress reliever right there
So is this post about a super cool gaming system? Eh, in a round about way I suppose. Mainly it’s about how tired I get of being a parent lol. How much I just want to shut myself in the bathroom and scream as long and as loud as I can.Wonder if the neighbors would be concerned to hear that.
On a side note, I got super lucky that I have a hubby that doesn’t like sports and only plays a few games. None of that Modern Warfare or Halo crap where the person is parked for HOURS screaming at the tv and into the little headset they wear. I am also learning that apparently I can only dance when Im drunk. Or maybe I just feel like I dance then…because according to the dancing game…I ain;t very good.
Here’s for a better Saturday! Since I am having a friend look at my car because of a horrible noise…this might be too much to ask for.
Big changes are coming to my little world. I have been sitting on some information for awhile now awaiting an actual answer. That answer came to me two days ago. I will most likely be going back to work full time in March sometime.
For 7 years I have worked on and off again for an apartment complex. My mom is the office manager and I would fill in at the office during her vacations or when she was sick. I also worked at their clubhouse for awhile. Most recently I’ve been cleaning vacant apartments since quitting Home Depot in January 2010. It was decently steady work that I could do anytime I was free. Extremely flexible which works well with two kids.
A couple of months ago my mom dropped the bomb that she was moving to Arizona in April. That is quite a distance away from Ohio. This is the source of major mixed feelings from me. I don’t want to dwell on those in this particular post so I was simply say I’m still a bit mixed up about it. That left her job open. Looks like I will slowly be integrating into her role as office manager over the next month or so. Building up to full-time by the middle to end of March.
The majority of me is thrilled. Don’t get me wrong. Thrilled. We need this. Since my husband has been laid off a few times over the last couple of years, our bank account has greatly suffered. It will be nice not to worry about how to buy groceries each week and pay the bills too. The rest of me is scared shitless. I haven’t worked full-time since my son was 1 yr old. I have always had steady part-time work since then working around whatever my husband was working at the time. Both kids are in school full-time now and I always said that was when I’d attempt to go back. I just never thought I’d have to do it without any help at all because my mom would be moving across the damn country.
I now have to coordinate after school care because I won’t be able to pick the kids up. Husband’s work schedule is unpredictable and so everything will fall to me to make sure the kids have somewhere to go after school should they need to. Not to mention summer and break care. I will have all kinds of new responsibility and a daily set in stone schedule, plus apt showings after work. Seriously, the thought of it makes me sick to my stomach. Change takes me a while to get used to.
I don’t think it’s simply the job. I think it’s everything all at once. I’m not eating right, I’m shakey, I have felt like crap for the past couple of days. No, it’s not the flu. It’s stress and I know it. Everything is becoming real to me and I think it’s taking its toll all at once. Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I thought my mom wouldn’t move. Maybe I thought this would never happen. But it is and I guess it’s time I step up to the plate and figure out what I am going to do now. How I am going to juggle a full-time job and two kids without much help. No more nights out, as my mom is pretty much my only babysitter. I have other relatives around but none I’m really close with, save my cousin Julie of course.
This summer I will turn 30. I guess, whether I am ready or not, it’s time for me to be the grown up. Time for me to do it all on my own. No one to lean on anymore. It’s me and the hubster against the world. Roar. Here we come.
So what does that mean for this blog? Nothing I hope. I am going to continue to strive to be the best I can be. If I end up whining to you all more regularly, well, you’ll just have to excuse me. Book reviews and hot guys will continue to grace my page hopefully on a daily basis. LOL. You may be seeing a bit more of Danielle as I make the transition. I will have to wait and see how big a hit this takes on my reading time.I figure tons of other bloggers manage to work full-time, so I can to. A perk is that I can take my laptop to work with me daily if need be. My office will have wifi
My cousin likes to call me Superwoman. We are about to test that theory.
So I’m sitting at the office right now, filling in for my mom. We both work for the same apartment rental complex. I clean vacant apartments (as well as have clients outside the complex) and my mom is the office manager. Quitting my part-time retail job last winter (January of this year) was a hard decision. However the company I worked for wasn’t as flexible as I needed it to be and when my hubby got laid off AGAIN last summer and started working weird shifts through a temp agency, retail would not be good right now.
My mom is moving to Arizona next spring. I may or may not get this job as office manager. That has yet to be seen. However for the time being when she goes out-of-town or is sick I always fill in. Last week I moved all my cleaning jobs around to fit into the same week instead of alternating weekly. I have 1 weekly cleaning and 2 bi weekly cleanings as well as 1 monthly. I fit them all in last week so no one would go without cleaning too long while I cover the office. I will be here in the office through the 23rd. My mom should be back the 23rd or 24th.
I am extremely busy with being here, and scheduling who is watching the kids since Christmas break starts this next week. That was slightly stressful pulling together. IF I get this position full time next year I will know much further in advance so setting up summer/afterschool daycare shouldn’t be a huge issue.
So why am I telling you all this? Come on, that’s what you’re wondering right? Well I feel distant lately. I feel like all my energy is being pulled in opposite directions. Don’t worry, I will still have posts here almost every day. In fact I have an ARC giveaway coming on Monday (the 20th) that you most certainly do NOT want to miss out on. It’s a book I wholeheartedly recommend…and I LOVED IT. I also have a special guest blog next week as well as a hump day hottie (yum-o).
It’s hard to voice what is actually going on in my brain. I think I mentioned a long time ago…back before I had any followers (HA)…that I tend to suffer from bouts of depression. I get much worse during the winter months. The colder it gets, and it worse I feel. It’s pretty darn cold in Ohio right now, LOL.
Just bear with me through the Christmas holiday. Once I get into a rhythm it will be much easier for me to fit everything in. Next year will bring with it new and exciting changes! Both in my personal life and here on Ramblings! I have some great stuff planned!
