usmcsis's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- only 103 shopping days until christmas i tried to add an entry early this morning but i got the overloaded servers message. i guess between it being 9/11 and the first weekend of the school year damn near everyone in america was trying to post. jeff came to see me at work for a little while yesterday. i haven't seen him in a month or so. we've talked a few times and emailed a few, but we're both moving on with our lives. he told me about the kids first week of school. told me about his nevereanding search for the perfect job. asked how daddy was. asked how mama was. asked how i was. he has already promised to be at the services with me if i want him there. i took my break while he was there so we could go out and smoke a cigarette together. while we were standing out there he looked at me for a minute to which i replied WHAT? he just kind of shook his head and said nothing. then he said "you look like you are doing well." i am doing well. i am doing fucking terrific. i mean, i have my issues. my car is broke, it's going to cost me a fortune to fix, i'm stressed at work, my dad is dying, my grandmother is losing her mind, my mother is depressed and suicidal. but i feel better, mentally and emotionally, than i have ever felt in my life. is that bad? with the exception of a day here or there when i feel like poop and i just want to hide out and sleep the day away, i haven't had a severe depressive episode in a while. and i don't think i will have anymore. because i have learned how to deal with them. i know that i am okay, i'm not a bad person. being depressed is not my punishment for being bad. it's an illness that i can cure all by myself. for the first time in my life, i love myself. and i'm pretty damned proud of that. so i spent my day helping my mom clean out the living room. we cleaned out the attic tuesday and took a load of crap to the dump. since the attic had been crammed full of junk we've been storing other junk in the living room for lack of anywhere else to put it. mainly it's all of our christmas decorations, some of my junk from when i actually had my own home and some of my brother's junk, most of which we don't know what it is and don't want to know. and a lot of it was trash. my mom is a huge packrat. she's not a normal packrat though. she'll hoard stuff and hoard and hoard and hoard and then all of a sudden one day she sweeps through the house throwing away everything in her path. seriously, she's like hurricane spring clean. if you want to keep something you better hide it. anyway, back to todays story. we decided the week before last that we needed to get the living room cleaned up so that when the enevitable happens with my dad and the entire family descends upon us, they will have somewhere to sit and eat and talk. we really only use the living room for occasions like christmas and stuff. the rest of the year it pretty much sits there with the french doors closed. unused. unless we set the ironing board up in there. so we went in and started throwing away and boxing stuff to go to goodwill and boxing up christmas decorations and such. i had four boxes of stuff from my old house which i got down to less than one box of stuff. the rest was either trash or goodwill. we decided that since christmas is right around the corner that we were not going to haul all of the boxes of christmas decorations up to the attic just to have to turn around and haul them back down in a couple of months. so we stacked them on the back wall out of the way. if anything should happen and we need that room before christmas eve, then we can move the boxes elsewhere for that time. granted the christmas tree is still up from last year. but i'll be damned if i'm wasting all that time to take it down now. just to put it back up in novemeber. no way. like with the decorations, i am taking the easy way out on this one. anyone who has an issue with our christmas tree being up for practically a year can kiss my caboose. besides, mama and i both work retail and we have both just finished having unbelievably busy months. people were spending money on their kids for back to school like it was going out of style. all those political and economical analysts can say what they want, people are spending money. anyway, so we have less than a month to rest up and then both of our stores are gearing up for christmas. i mean, we have halloween in our store now. on october 31, we will have an overnight team to work and set up the christmas area. hell, we'll have some christmas set before then. and mama and i will come home every night exhausted and we will be dragging ass from now until january. so, any short cuts we can take, we're going to take. so daddy's gone to the dump to get rid of all the trash we piled in the back of his truck. mama has gone to goodwill to donate all of the stuff that she felt too guilty about to throw away. and i'm in the process of finally doing some laundry. speaking of which, i do believe the dryer should be done by now. toodles 4:35 pm - 11 Sep 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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