It would have been my regular yearly complaining about the challenges of planning a kids birthday party, in winter when you have limited outdoor options, when you are too broke to pay the party place fees for a cool party, and have too tiny of a house to be able to pull anything off at home easily.

I spent a good chunk of the afternoon on google… trying to come up with something around here cheap but interesting. But ended up with little luck… even the YMCA charges more that $100 for having a party in their facilities, and that’s just for 10 kids.

My best idea for this year was taking about 5 or 6 girls to a build your own frozen yogurt place… but they don’t really have room for a real party there. So it would have been rather lame.

—

Then, out of the blue, yesterday’s groupon for our area was for a birthday party. Seriously!

The party actually wasn’t even in the subject line, it was another option that was mentioned after you’d already opened the email about “bug lady science classes” for schools, which I’m not even sure why I opened!

I’ve never seen a party listed before… and honestly, the vast majority of the time the emails they send get deleted unread, let alone read within the first few hours after they are sent.

But there it was… a normally $250, 2 hour long, for 25 kids, cake and drinks and party favor included, birthday party being sold for $80 after the credit I had from a previous deal that hadn’t worked out right.

And grandma decided that it was low enough that she was willing to buy it as her present to Boo.

It’s at a local place that does insect and animal and birds hands-on educational demonstrations for local schools and preschools… that I’d never even realized we had in town.

Miss animal lover is thrilled.

Even better, when I spoke with them on the phone to book it, the 25 person count only actually counts people eating cupcakes… parents of kids, and other relatives that won’t be doing cupcakes don’t get counted against the total.

And so she’s being allowed to invite the entire class, including the teacher, as well as the cousins.

And the family of the cousins who are always unpredictable as to whether or not there will be a sudden excuse about how it’s too far to drive, or someone else needs the car during that time, and assorted other variations? This place happens to be a mile and a half from their door.

—

I can’t say a bug party would have ever crossed my mind… but gotta be thrilled about a perfect sounding party “just happening” to be in my email.

Someday I’m gonna learn to stop worrying about things that seem like big issues to sort out but are really but tiny blips.

Namely, a requirement to allow child support enforcement to seek support on your behalf, and if successful, they keep any child support paid for the time that you are in the program.

I’ve tried this on three different occasions over the years, as it’s also a requirement for some of the other government services in this state.

But, it has always ended up going nowhere. Because mine is a complicated situation where we had lived at the same address, but then I had moved while he didn’t. So even though my daughter was born here, and we hadn’t even known I was pregnant when I moved, this still gives the state where he lives jurisdiction… meaning they have to be the ones to prove paternity, get court orders, and enforce payment.

All my state can do is request that they do this. Afterwards I can file motions for a change of juristiction, but the initial work has to be done there. (A 16 hour drive away from here, meaning its not likely I’d even be able to attend the court dates when they do so.)

Thus far, every time they have tried, the other state has said that they are unable to track him down, and thus unable to establish any paternity. Because he hasn’t had consistent employment, addresses, etc.

Which, surprisingly enough, has been a good outcome to me.

Because there’s also a dark side of this.

Because the people working “on my behalf” very clearly spell out that they do not work on the parent’s behalf, but on the state’s financial behalf.

So the fact that establishing paternity to make him pay also gives him grounds for custody and visitation is completely ignored other than to say that it’s outside of the scope of their responsibility.

So, in other words, court declarations will be made that can have a major impact in our lives… several states from here, without me there, with the people there in my place hired by the state and only concerned with money.

Gee, that doesn’t have the potential to go really poorly.

—

Especially when you look at the past situation that got things to this point… a controlling relationship that turned sexual through coercion bordering on rape depending on your definition, that only later turned physically violent and was revealed to have drug abuse involved. (Amazing how the luster of a rebound relationship can blind to massive red flags)

Followed by literal stalking following my fleeing the relationship, and a planned adoption thwarted by his refusal to consent to it and threats to sue for custody if it went ahead anyway (that I had no documentation or concrete proof of the abuse to be able to legally prevent from happening)

—

Eventually followed by my attempts to allow him to be involved being used as further attempts at controlling me without him actually taking any responsibility or real involvement with her.

He stormed out of the hospital (where he wasn’t to have been told I’d been admitted but managed to find out anyway) a few days after she was born after I got mad that he’d intentionally woke her up after a rough night of my dealing with her not sleeping… claiming this showed I wasn’t going to let him be involved… and thus he isn’t listed on the birth certificate or other paperwork.

He came back to the state a couple of months later, staying for a few months, but every time he wanted to see her, it turned into him ignoring her and instead spending the time trying to interrogate me, attempting to make me feel guilty for everything bad that happened in his life, and making unwanted sexual advances.

—

After he left again, he’s been back just once, to see her on Christmas about a year and a half later. Which was spent accusing me of turning her against him (because why else would she be treating him as a stranger… when she’s not even two and hasn’t seen him in over a year?), and trying to make me feel guilty about going to family events that he’d been told about in advance, and for having a new stable relationship. And again, pretty much ignoring the fact she was even in the room.

He hasn’t been back since, nor has he even asked to see her, or to speak to her, or written to her or sent cards etc (he does have my mother’s address, which hasn’t changed). Not once.

I’ve never once blocked his involvement, or denied visits or contact… because I’ve never had to.

Every so often he’ll send an instant message to my yahoo account, but only to either blame me or to go back to threatening to sue for custody. And weirdly enough, a couple times he’s actually had a girlfriend of his contact me to essentially tell me the same thing… that his problems are all my fault and he’s going to get custody as soon as his tax return comes in, etc.

Which I’ve learned to stop freaking out in fear about, and see not as actual interest, but just more games as an attempt to get to me.

—

Thus, his having court paperwork establishing paternity is not particularly in my best interest mentally. But especially when he will be able to be at the court hearings to set things, and I will not. Nor can I afford a private lawyer to fight anything independently that the state’s team will just say is outside of their interests.

And so, it came as a bad sign when instead of sending the usual letter, his state sent back a message stating that they needed a certified copy of her birth certificate sent to them. Basically, I was required to provide this, or I’d be banned from not only the job program, but also other government help that would require cooperation.

About this time was when I got hired, and thus was out of the job program, and participation again became voluntary.

And so I did not send the form to get the certified copy.

Because the potential for actually getting any support from someone who rarely keeps a job long are very low. And the potential for this paperwork causing me issues is rather high.

—

Sometime in December, there was a facebook post going around mentioning that not all of your messages are in your inbox. To get to the ones from pages and from people you aren’t friends with, you have to go to the main messages page, and then click “other” on the sidebar.

And when I did so, I had a message from him.

After previous stalking issues, no huge surprise that he’d found my page even with the name not being a match from what he knew. I’d pretty much expected him to track it down eventually, and had kept privacy settings as tight as possible, made sure no profile pics had my daughter in them, no location settings given, etc.
(This is also a lot of why this blog has so little identifiable info, and links to my other facebook page in no way involving my personal info.)

Anyway, this message was sent back in June.

And for a change, it wasn’t a threat. It was a message telling me that he was on disability now, so if I wanted child support to go for it, because they would be paying it, not him.

Ironically, sent just a few weeks before the job program required me to go after it.

My first impression is annoyance that a lowlife who can’t keep a job now and doesn’t support his kid has a free ride while the rest of us bust our rears to attempt to provide basic needs….
followed by annoyance that the most likely cause of the disability was his own drug and alcohol problems…
followed by annoyance that he’s fine with child support only as long as someone else is paying for it…
followed by annoyance with the system after I’d googled around enough and found out he was pretty much right that they would pay a separate amount to his dependents and not have any effect on him at all.

—

But, this means the government knows where he is.

Which means, if I send the certificate, they should be able to track him now. So it’s pretty much a certain shot that if I make that choice, I will find myself going down the road of dealing with the court’s rulings.

Though, it does also mean when things are set, payment wouldn’t be dependent on him keeping a job, and should be pretty stable. And from the numbers given on pages that google pulled up for his state, would be almost as much as I was getting as a stipend from the job program.

However, besides the rub-in factor, I know he wouldn’t have just been sending this to me out of the goodness of his heart or concern for our well being.

He knows this opens doors of having his paternity legally established… without his having to be the one to come up with the fees and take the effort to sue over it.

—

I know that it’s a carrot in a trap from his perspective…. because everything with him over the years has turned out to just be moves in his own manipulative little control game.

A game I’ve long since stopped being willing to play.

And it makes me mad (as well as hurt at the unfairness of life) to be stuck in a position where I really need the carrot, and yet know I’m going to be forced to play games again if I take it.

And unless something new comes along soon, I’m going to end up having to resort back to the job program…. meaning I don’t even get a choice in whether or not to take it. It’s a situation of take it voluntarily (maybe even avoid the need to go back into the program), or go back into the program and be forced to take it anyway.

I’m thinking I lose either way.

I can’t even just give up and be a welfare queen, because that requires cooperation too.

—

So unless I can find a new job before my tax refund money runs out, I’m stuck thrown into choosing providing for my child over being able to protect my child from an abusive drug addict.

This planet sucks.

Two different nights, about a week or so apart.. but both sort of an oddly sexual feel. Which of course made them even more weird, being a single female that hasn’t had a sex life in many years, or even dated in many for that matter.

—

The first dream had a series of guys… apparently guys that were being dated.

The guys changed frequently… from makeout session to makeout session… at an almost frantic pace. All different types, all different private scenes, but this heavily physical frenzy ran throughout.

And then, in the end, there was a calm scene. A room full of people who seemed to be friends, watching a movie on the tv in a casual setting.

I was on my side towards the back of the room, with a guy that I once had a crush on sitting behind me leaning against something.

For balance, he set his hand on my side at the waist gently. Not something meant as affection, just familiarity and balance, not even really an intentional planned out move.

And yet..

The effect from just the soft and gentle touch in a completely non-sexual way had an effect that just spread throughout my body, with such a calm that the frenzied feeling just completely left.

—

The second dream made the leap from making out to full on sexual encounters, but with a similar setup. Different guys, different places, same thing over and over.

But this one had a totally different feel. Where the first had more of a feeling like I was the one controlling and causing things, this one had a feeling of being trapped. Instead of a frantic feel, it had more of a forced repetition to it… but in a rough, harsh way.

Eventually it came to the final scene, where I was with two men, but an ex boyfriend of mine happened through the area. In real life, we dated for about a year and a half, a stable relationship but nothing of real depth or attachment… I got the feeling we’d dated in the dream too, but not that far in the past.

So he comes into the picture, and I know that if I can just sleep with him, I won’t be trapped, and everything will be over. Everything will be ok.

And so I start begging and pleading and bargaining with the guys that I was with, and they approach him, and ask him to pay to sleep with me. He steps over closer to me, and very gently touches my hand to get me to look up at him… then asks me if this is what I want. I nod, and hope he can see from my eyes how desperate I am.

And so he pays the guys. For what was previously his without having to pay.

The guys disappear. Things proceed, and even though I’d been sure this would make things right, it wasn’t. I got hopeless and scared that I was trapped forever… when he pauses and looks into my eyes with a look filled with love and compassion… then softly asks if this is what I really wanted.

I burst into tears of disappointment… and he pulls me up to him and into his arms and just holds me… and suddenly, this is what fixes everything. As he just sits there holding me, not moving or doing anything, somehow all of the trapped feeling melts and everything feels peaceful and safe now.

—

Sometimes I don’t really get the meaning of the weird dreams. But this time, after the second one, I woke up and actually think I do this time.

I think sometimes in practice, I lust after God more than I love him. (Yes, I know that sounds weird. )

I want to feel the big feelings. I want him to reach down in an amazing moment of power… in a decisive way… with no doubt whatsoever.

I want the times what are just so unmistakeable… just so clearly God moments.

I want the passion. An earth-shattering moment to suddenly change everything. Mountaintop moments.

And I completely forget about how much of the time peace and love come not through the big moments… but through the small ones.

Through just being held.

Through soft, gentle touches that you might miss in the frenzy.

From the quiet, still moments.

I’m sometimes too busy wishing for lightning to just be still and soak.

In human relationships, it’s basically the difference between lust and love. I feel like I’m going after what is really love, when I’m really caught up in the feelings and looking for passion, not the true depth that I really long for.

The gentle times of quiet depth bring the peace, the freedom, the calm.

It ends the frenzied chase for dramatic feelings, and the trapped hopelessness that sometimes comes from life.

The feelings and passionate moments have their place, but it’s a secondary place… not what I need to be looking for, but what should come on their own in their own time as a result.

Sometimes I’m too busy asking for fire to fix things to pay attention to the slow moving water in the stream.

I have very mixed feelings about this.

On one hand, I’m ok with it. I knew it was seasonal with no guarantees to begin with.

And, honestly, the job is probably a bit beyond my level physically at times, particularly when dealing with the home chemical section on truck unload. Ever try to pick up a box loaded with 8 large bottles of laundry soap? Repeatedly? Sometimes carrying them back to the pallet stepping over other stuff and around other pallets? There were several mornings that I found myself feeling light headed and/or like I was going to vomit… and just had to tough it out.

That works for a while… but eventually it’s going to catch up.

And, with family circumstances around here changing, it’s likely that at some point this spring, I will lose my morning babysitter. 6am start time does not work well with childcare… let alone when 4am rolled around again.

Plus, the days drop down to 3 a week from here, and the hours drop from being 6-8 per day to being closer to 4-5. 15 hours a week, at $8 an hour, does not go very far. Further than the job program stipend… but still a rough go at making ends meet as an only job.

—

But then there is always the other hand.

First, the obvious, job and paycheck is better than no paycheck, pretty much regardless of the job or pay rate. 8 time 15 is still much higher than 0.

But, honestly?

The bigger thing that bugs me is actually that the decisions on keeping people seem to have been in no way influenced by staffing needs or common sense.

—

They kept a total of 3 people from our department.

Truck unload is a mandatory part of the job… especially for seasonal… with no exceptions. Including the guy who had a 10 pound lifting restriction from his doctor and was basically told the job involved lifting and ended up even being stuck on worse areas than he had been before the restriction.

But… there were actually two exceptions to this among the seasonal workers. One of whom was a lady in her 60’s, which I’d agree was a valid physical limitation…. the other of which was a girl younger than me and in better physical shape than me who declared after her first day on truck that she just couldn’t handle it…. and because she got along well with the manager who plays favorites heavy, they got the exception. (this was the manager mentioned in a previous post who seems to pretty much hate me)

And so, if you are picking people to keep, especially when you are going to be low staffed with the losses, you’d want to keep the people who could handle the job well, right? Nope. Both of these were in the 3 who were kept.

The other interesting issue was that of schedules. We were pretty much told first day that the end time listed on our schedules meant nothing… that they couldn’t legally keep us past the time listed for that day, but that we were expected to work until all of the freight had been finished.

Usually, this meant at least 6 hour days, with the regular option of 8 if you wanted it… and especially early on, offers to go to other stores on the days that ours didn’t have trucks to help them with getting their trucks done in decent time.

All of us just accepted this… with 2 exceptions. One was the lady in her 60’s from above, who said she wasn’t able to work that many hours… and the other was a guy who kept using his “other job” as the excuse he could never stay beyond the time listed, even when our main manager at times pretty much begged him, offered to buy him lunch, etc. The real eye rolls starting when we found out that his “other job” that was so critical was that he sells candles from a catalog… nothing that would be tied to his leaving at 8am being a critical matter.

And yup… this guy was the other person kept. Even though a lot of times he wasn’t even there long enough for the first department he worked in for the day to be completed yet.

—

It’s sort of weird… because the people who are permanent employees are actually more worked up about these decisions than the seasonal people being let go.

Because it’s them that will have to pick up the slack of being two people short on truck unload, and of having two people leave early every day.

In addition to just the regular level of work that gets added anyway when the seasonal people are lost, instead of their new teammates being people who will add the most to the team, they seem to have almost intentionally picked the people who will add to the team’s usefulness the least. All of the rest of us worked our tails off… and among the let-go are several guys in good shape that could easily have been twice as useful as the women who don’t work the unload. We worked crazy hours and did everything they asked of us whether it was our job or not, and they seemed to reward the ones who did the least and had the least commitment.

There’s theories going around as to why they would make the decisions that they did… none of which involve helping the team. Many seem to think they picked these people assuming they will quit from the low commitment, thus making the payroll look better.

Others blame diversity… the ones who were kept all have reasons that they look good on the statistics, where those of us who were let go are mostly white and all under 40.

The one I believe is the theory that it was just a matter of the manager who plays favorites. They all three were ones that she liked. Many of the rest of us were on her apparent hate list. While the decisions were made by both of the managers plus the HR person, our other manager is sweet and outgoing, and I don’t think would have been willing to cause a major rift by going against the other…. and the HR lady was luck to even know our names let alone anything about our work performance beyond just attendance numbers.

—

In any case… when it comes down to it, even if they had kept more and done the decisions by staffing usefulness, I’m thinking that the strong guys would have been the most useful choices to keep, so it would have had the same result in my case.

So I suppose it shouldn’t matter to me much anyway, but it still just sort of rubs me the wrong way.

Partially about fairness to those who gave their best and gave their all to what they were supposed to do.

And partially still because of feeling hurt about the one manager who plays favorites… assigning favor or rejection that appeared to have no basis on the person’s actual performance.

And because when it comes down to it, I know I gave it the best I was able. I wasn’t the strongest person there, but I did the best I could under the circumstances…. and I held my own at least as well as many of the permanent employees.

I may not have been the best candidate, but I’m confident that I wasn’t at the bottom either, and I’m proud of myself on sticking out the rough spots, getting things done quickly and correctly, becoming flexible enough to work in almost any department, and being useful to both the team and to customers.

—

And so I’m sort of ok with the fact that I’m not entirely ok with it, if that makes any sense.

Because the reasons I’m not ok are over things that I’m glad that I’m not ok with.

I think I’d be more worried if it didn’t bother me when things seem unfair, or if my work ethic had been low enough to have not felt some hurt when faced with unjustified judgement.

May not be the most pleasant feeling, but I suppose I’m actually glad that I’m feeling that way.

—

The first one actually starts a few years back, working full time for a call center.

When training had ended, I was somewhat disappointed to find out that the majority of our training class had been split between two of the teams… with only me and one other person each having a different team.

As it turned out, my team was the best team in the center, regularly winning the contests no matter which stat they chose to base it on, and was one of the very top teams in the company. We were often the test people when they decided that they wanted to try something different to improve speed.

About six months in, at a random team meeting, there was a discussion of the team losing some members lately… and the team lead happened to mention that we’d be getting 2 new members from the training class that started the next week.

Wait, he knew that already? Yup. He knew because our placement on his team hadn’t been random, or made by space available, or decided by performance in training. We’d been selected for the team back before we were even actually hired, based on our scores on the application testing. From the logic and reasoning tests that’d seem to have no real relevance other than to weed out the really clueless ones, and on the typing test.

The tests that’d seem overly simple during the training had basically just been to prove we’d been trained. We’d already been picked to go to the star team by that point, even though nobody had told us that.

I remember feeling a bit amazed… and seeing a lot of parallels between the feelings that came from knowing we’d been chosen beforehand and being one of the ones known before the world began to be a chosen child.

I’d long since forgotten about that day. I’d had a really rough time with the company after tendonitis in my wrists had made them hurt really bad, and had battles constantly with stats in spite of doctor paperwork that should have made them no longer an issue.

So the last 6 months I’d worked there hadn’t gone well.

—

So back to the current day… and in a discussion with someone on the work program about experience, we figure out that we both actually worked for that call center at the same time. I actually remember their name being one of the other team leads… because they have a somewhat unusual name… but where I was not on their team, it’s unlikely we ever actually had much contact unless it was in the lunchroom.

And so they ask me who my team lead was… and I tell them… and they seem impressed, and start asking questions about my stats and ranking and such. Suddenly I remember that team meeting.

And I also remember… that before my wrist issues started coming into play, my ranking was always high… usually in the top 5 on my team… and several times I was on the top 100 (out of about 6000 in the company) on quality checks.

Funny how I got so focused on the way things turned out that I forget that things hadn’t always been that way.

So I explained a bit to the person what had happened… and they asked if I’d tried switching to another team where they wouldn’t be hurt by the stats as much.

That thought had never once come to my mind.

But it does actually make a lot of sense that they would have been giving me a harder time on the stats even with the doctors orders because I was on one of their star teams… one of the ones they watched closely on pilot tests.. rather than a team where my slower stats would have been closer to normal.

They then mentioned their team average.

Which turned out to be slower than my bad performance when things were going poorly.

All that I could say was that I’d wished they had told me that back then!

—

The second incident came a couple of weeks after the first.

I got a random summons to court… in a small town an hour away from here where I haven’t been since grade school… regarding a case from when I was a dispatcher in a town about half an hour from there.

Over 5 years earlier!

I grumbled a bit… but mostly everyone said it was likely to be something where I’d just have to vouch for my signature or that nobody else had my log in code on something that I’d entered into records.

So I called the day before court, hoping I would find out I didn’t have to go. Nope, I was needed.

So I make the drive… and arrive in the courtroom to find it empty except for one person working on a computer. I verify at the office that I have the right spot.

After a rather weird ten minutes or so, a lawyer arrives… and introduces himself. He knows who I am without my telling him.

And it turns out, this all stems back to an email I’d sent.

You see, I worked second shift, which was often really busy, so it was usually easier to email all of the officers to give them an FYI about something, rather than catch all of the officers as they came through and count on them to pass it on to other shifts like the other dispatchers usually did.

On this particular occasion, there had been a traffic related call out at the lake that was part of our territory, but several miles from town. Since the officers were busy, one of the lake staff, who have no real authority other than a flashing light and ability to ban from the lake, had pulled the person over instead.

They had called me and given me the tag number and license number over the phone… so that I could check them, and basically just give him a yes or no as to whether we needed him to keep the person there and send an officer out.

They came back ok, so we didn’t.

Shortly afterwards, I’d gotten a call from the city where the court papers were from. One of their county dispatchers had heard our radio giving out the info about the traffic issue… and as it happens, their city had been looking for the same style of vehicle for a major incident that had happened at their lake the day before… but they’d had no tag info, and only a physical description of the driver.

So I called back out to our lake, to see if the guy was still there. He wasn’t, but only then did the lake staff person tell me that they’d banned him for the day because they’d had some incidents happen earlier with him…. that were similar to the ones the other city had dealt with (when I hadn’t told him what the other city had said), but not yet pushing the point of illegal, so they hadn’t called us.

And so… I called back to the other city… told them what our lake staff had said, and gave them the info that we had.

From that, they’d been able to get drivers license photos and do a photo line-up, and have all of the victims identify the person we’d stopped as being the one that they’d had the incident with just two days before.

And so, they’d managed to go from only having a description to having physical description and car to try and solve this major issue… to knowing the exact suspect information and having the victims identify them… using the information they’d gotten from us.

So, the guy had apparently fled, and was just now being brought back to the area for his first trial… to show there was enough evidence to do the full jury trial.

And that’s where my email came into the picture.

After I’d gotten off the phone with the officer in the other city, I’d sent out a long, very detailed email to all of the officers who worked on the street… letting them know to keep an eye out for the vehicle.

I gave them all of the tag and drivers license info, his name and physical description from the drivers license… the descriptions that the other city had given me… the officer i’d spoken to there… what they said had happened… the person i’d talked to at our lake… the information about the traffic stop… the information about what they’d said had happened earlier… and the names of the lake staff that’d had contact with him that day.

The sort of email that I’d get teased about the length by one of the other dispatchers who usually just passed on the basics verbally to her shift.

But, in my attempt to give my officers anything they might need to know to followup if we had any more problems with them, I’d ended up making the perfect, well documented paper trail for the court in the other city. Names and details that wouldn’t have been on the record otherwise, because we technically didn’t have much of a record with him… all we’d done was stop him to warn him about a traffic violation by someone who couldn’t have even given him a ticket for it if they’d wanted to. Phone calls were recorded, but only kept for a certain time unless they were known to be needed for something.

—

And so, after asking me if I remembered anything else that I hadn’t written in the email (5 years later? lol), the lawyer left me by myself in the courtroom again for about 5 more minutes. As it turned out, shown the email and told that the dispatcher who’d written it was present, the suspect decided to change his plea and not go through the trial to show that there was a reason to have a jury trial.

The lawyer thanked me for coming, and went on about how he owed me, etc.

And then, less than half an hour after I’d arrived, I was on the way back home… somewhat amused, somewhat amazed.

And realizing that if the other primary dispatchers had taken that series of calls on their shift, that the man would have probably had a much different case…. especially had it actually gone to trial and it made the difference whether or not the staff who’d had contact with him would have been known.

But the part that hit me a bit was the date.

That email was written within a couple on months of the end of my working there.

Putting it smack dab in the middle of the small town politics that would eventually end my job… and well into the time when I’d reached the point of realizing it would be ending before the end of that year.

Through my time with that job, I’d often found myself fighting tears at staff meetings over the petty politics and jabs at each other. And yet, at the last one I’d had, which would have been within a few weeks of this email, I found that I’d reached the point that I no longer cared anymore. It no longer phased me in the slightest to be warned for handling a call the way that I’d been told to do so by my supervisor but which was different than the supervisor of another shift wanted it handled. (There was no actual written protocol on this issue)

Looking back I probably would have given my effort and performance during that time about a C. Passing, getting the job done… but beyond the point where there was any illusion that anything I did was going to make things better.

—

But, with the call center discussion fresh in mind… I’m wondering if I’m being overly harsh and critical over myself.

Was my performance the best at either job at the end? No. Neither one considered at the end would be something I’m proud of.

But I think sometimes I’m focusing on that… and forgetting there were plenty of other times that I did really well at both jobs.

It’s really easy to write them both off as messes… but I’m starting to see that maybe they weren’t as bad as I thought they were.

Not my best, but maybe in the ok zone after all.

It had pretty much ended up that I was going to bed about 9:30 pm, getting up around 2:30am, working until about 10 or 11am depending on the day, then coming home and napping until about 3 pm.

Which doesn’t allow a lot of time for getting things done, and sort of disorients you a bit when you aren’t entirely sure initially whether the 3:00 alarm that just woke you up is the middle of the night or the middle of the afternoon. (Old house, heavy curtains for drafts block more light than you’d think)

Anyway… my point in all of this is actually just to give my excuse as to why I was having trouble staying away in church, when the service we attend doesn’t even start until 11:15. (The new regular nap time!)

—

And so, as one of my regular stay-awake strategies in both church and classes, I found myself picking random key words, and using my finger to trace them out on my leg, letter by letter, line by line. It’s sort of weird, but it works. LOL

And midway through a totally random word, I found myself completely unable to remember what word I was spelling.

I remembered the past couple of letters, but they were vague… 2 vowels and an “R”… could have been anything (Ok, well, actually it couldn’t, “anything” doesn’t have an “R”…)

And in one of those abrupt lightning bolt moments, a point having absolutely nothing to do with the sermon hit me.

—

Sometimes when not patient, even when actively listening at the moment, you don’t the messages… it takes time and patience and dedicated focus to both add the new and build upon the old.

—

I’m hearing/feeling the current letter as it becomes traced out and built line by line, I’m remembering the past few… but it takes the focus, and attention, and a whole lot of patience to wait… to let it play out and keep with it… to have it make any sense.

Not just as each line/event builds upon the next to make a letter showing where it falls into place to make sense with the other lines….. but then as each letter is built upon the next to form the word and give meaning to the letters and to get the message they send.

Let alone to someday get the whole story that the sentence tells.

—

Which, really, is what’s driving me nuts right now.

I’m sitting here with an “E”, an “R”, and an “A”… and I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m supposed to be doing with them. I’ve seen how the lines fit together intentionally, I know there’s a word being spelled out purposefully… but I still haven’t the foggiest idea where this is going or what I’m supposed to be doing with it just yet.

Is ERA the word? Are there more letters coming to make it ERASE etc? Did I miss letters before them and only catching the middle of the word?

—

It’s not that I don’t see any signs of a point in all of the junk of the past few years… it’s that I feel like I’m lost, clueless, and haven’t caught the foggiest idea of what it is or what I’m supposed to be doing with it.

Treading water of survival and feeling like I have no clue what direction I’m supposed to be swimming.

—

Now as to whether this means I’m needing to realize that this is still early in a long haul process and to stick with it and give it time and focus before it’s going to have an obvious meaning…
Or meaning that I’m needing to refocus on past lessons and connect them to recent and current happenings…
Or both…

At some point in 2010, I’d started using youversion.com, so that I could read online if I didn’t feel like grabbing my bible that is already set up to be used with the plan.

And I’ve kept with youversion for all of this year. Partially because of the ability to highlight and copy/paste that initially drew me to it, partially because it gives the ability to track days, and partially because it has an android app that I can read on my phone and have it sync, which is really nice for waiting in lines etc.

But… none of these are actually my favorite feature.

My favorite is a button that I’ve taken to calling the forgiveness button.

Officially it’s labelled “Catch me up”.

It’s more prominent on the phone app than it is on the website, but it works the same on both. All that it does is reset your reading plan. It looks at the last day that you did the reading, and it moves your schedule to where that reading passage becomes the passage that was assigned to yesterday.

So now, the next passage to be read happens to be the one that is listed for today.

There’s no “read 3 days worth in one day to make up for being sick”. There’s no “read what i’m supposed to for today, then go back and pick up the days where I missed, which are now totally out of context”.

No beating up or making hard at all. Just start back in.

It’s as if the lapse never happened… you move on from today, and forget the missed days were ever there.

There’s still consequences of course.. for each day that gets erased, it sets the completion date of your plan back another day.

And so, as new years rolls around… instead of being done, I’m looking at a calendar that says early April will be the end.

Is it as far as I’d like to be? No way!

It’s tempting to kick myself over basically being nearly 1/3 of the way behind… having missed almost 1/3 of the days.

But, really… that’s still 2/3 of the way that I wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t tried.

And, the days that are there are days that have been given quality, not quantity. They haven’t been rushed through because I’m trying to read a bunch at once to catch up. They haven’t been accidentally missed entirely.

And, really, they haven’t been read on days that they wouldn’t have had a fair shot of my focus and attention anyway. Because if my choice is to cram it in when I’m short on time and my mind is really distracted or to add another day into the new year, I was much more likely to just take the extra day than I would have been had it been a pain like it was when it would mean catching up in my hardcover bible that has printed dates for each section.

So even if it’s not where I want to be, it’s where I am… it’s the pace that’s working… it’s being done well instead of just done…

And in April I’ll know that it was done right. None of the passages skipped or crammed into marathons.

Very nice forgiveness button.

After our regular 10% discount that works on almost everything they sell.

At first, this just seemed like a cheesy gift. An additional discount that only worked on generic stuff?

But after a couple of days, it dawned on me.

Although our store only had a limited grocery section, several of the other stores in town have a full grocery-store sized section in them.

Filled with generic food items.

Suddenly a cheesy cheap seeming gift took a whole new twist.

We aren’t real picky around here on the vast majority of items… the generic brand at most of the major stores around here is decent at worst, and in some cases we actually prefer them to the name brands.

So, basically, this was giving me 20% off of all of my groceries and basic household items that I could buy in two weeks. Starting days after one paycheck, and ending two days after another.

Without using coupons, my first round total dropped from $140 something including tax to $110.

The math is sort of weird, because the first 10% comes off, then the second 10% came of of that lower total, and then the tax got recalculated using the lowest total…. but it ended up being a $32 savings when all was said and done.

Not so cheesy after all maybe!

Maybe that doesn’t seem like much when compared to the big bonuses some places give out for Christmas. But for a seasonal retail job? That’s beyond what I would expect.

And still another round to go after I get paid in a few days.

Up till now, the only big savings I’ve had with the discount card was by helping a family member buy a video game system using it.

It’s sort of a rock and a hard place… so many things I’d love to use it on… but so few of them I can afford working here. LOL

Maybe by next year I can find a decent paying job, that has low hours so I can grab some weekends as a cashier or something to be able to get the discount card when I have the power to really do some shopping with that thing.

Actually, I’m still sort of wondering where exactly November ran off to.

And yet, tomorrow is one week from christmas.

And I’m still just not feeling any sort of christmas-y feelings yet. Even after putting up the tree, having most of gifts wrapped, and going to the church’s christmas play last night.

But then, neither am I feeling most of the negative feelings from past events coming back to haunt me connected to december dates either.

Maybe just too lost in the craziness of being up at 4am.

But breakfast this morning went from feeling to doing, and so I ended up calling in sick this morning.

And got the supervisor who doesn’t like me, who proceeded to give me attitude about it… as if I were being unreasonable to prefer to vomit at home than to be loading a pallet.

Even though this is the first day I’ve called in, or even been late…. and as a part time worker, it’s not like they are paying me sick time or anything, so I’m taking a hit of 1/8th of my next paycheck to do so.

—

And so I’ve come to the observation that you can tell a lot about how much a business truly respects their workers by how they treat them when they are sick.

Yes, ideally nobody would ever be sick, and so nobody would ever have to miss. But that’s not the real world.

And yet, the places I’ve worked that have been the worst have usually been the ones who have been absolute jerks about it when you needed to miss a day.

Including the one that only allowed 3 days missed in any 90 day period before you were able to be fired if they chose to… real fun when after 0 days missed for over a year, one month of bad luck brings an ankle that couldn’t have weight put on it, a kid getting sent home with an asthma attack, and a round of pink eye…. meaning 2 months of being on the chopping block at any given whim.

And the short stint as a parking deck attendant where I was told I was fine to come into work while throwing up because there was a bathroom about 50 feet away and I could just keep locking up the booth to run to it and run back.

I know there are always going to be people who abuse the absence policies… just as there are people who abuse any policy.
But still… some basic human respect would be a nice thing. If you treat workers like they are liars and cheats when they haven’t given you any signs of being either, do you really expect them to respect you any more than you respect them?

And it says quite a bit about your concern for your customers that you could care less if your employees are exposing them to whatever virus happens to be attacking at the moment.

You don’t see many cars parked in the lots between the buildings, but there are often a lot of people around on foot, or hanging out around the bus stops along the main street.

Honestly, I mostly ignore the area… or grumble when random large groups of teens from the area decide to wander this direction through the middle of the street ignoring the fact that there are cars backing up behind them… which happens more frequently than you’d think it ought to.

But in the past month or so, something along the main street has caught my eye.

In front of one of the homes, in the front strip that faces the main street in that area, someone puts out a sign on most days… made of wood and bright colored poster board…

That said “Warm soup” and had an arrow pointing to the apartment. It’s now had the word free added to the top.

And when you look over to the porch, there’s a small table about 2 foot deep and 4 foot long set up and pushed against the building near the door, about where a flower bed would usually be.

And on the table is a clearly visible crockpot… and a low box that holds other items… a large box of crackers, and I’d assume the other things that you can’t see as well are probably things like bowls and spoons.

There’s two more posterboards with lots of words written on them taped above the table, but the words are too small to read from the street.

I’ve actually been a bit tempted to walk up there, just to read them and see what they say.

But it really sort of impresses me just how simple and random this little soup porch is.

I assume it’s just put out there by a resident… as a church or charity would probably get hit with all sorts of regulations on leaving food unattended. This city is known to be picky even on things like handing out meals to homeless without having things like kitchen permits and food handlers cards.

Which given the area, means they probably aren’t real stable financially themselves to be living in the area. And I can only imagine that they can’t have been thrilled to be in one of the apartments facing the main busy street.

And yet… they are doing what they can to help others worse off.

And it’s as simple to make happen as a crockpot and box of crackers on a table and a few bright posterboards.

First, because they don’t have trucks on weekends except during the holidays, several of the regular staff have their schedules set so that they aren’t available for them… and they don’t pull others in off the floor to replace them.

Which means we are really short staffed on truck unload, sometimes as much as half of the sort crew missing.

Second, we have a different supervisor than the rest of the week. And this one really has never seemed to like me.. or several of the other people.

Where my main supervisor will tell me I’m doing well at keeping up, this one will instead look at the same situation and just criticize my pallet building placements (Something on which we were never actually trained, just kind of got thrown in and told to do.. which is harder than it looks when the boxes are all sorts of different sizes and weights, and coming at different times.)

So, you mix the two together…. and we’re short staffed while the unloaders have the regular 4 people… meaning we are getting really backed up… which means it’s even crazier to try and get things stacked and I’m barely managing to get things grabbed and on the pallet before they have been shoved harshly down and ending up past my area.

Large crates of 8 bottles of grape juice each holding 64 oz, or cases of 6 jugs of laundry soap, are bad enough to lift when they are somewhere near where they are going. They are much more of a pain when they are past your area, meaning you have to step over things and around poles to go get them and carry them back while even more things are getting shoved past you.

Life is much much easier when the staffing is decent. When it isn’t, the job starts to really suck.

—

But today was especially bad.

I had three areas to cover… groceries, household chemical (laundry soap, etc), and health and beauty. Areas with lots of stuff, lots of the heaviest stuff, and lots of random sized boxes.

Probably my least favorite area, but one they keep sticking me in. Seems to be a low man on the totem pole sort of thing.

In addition to being down people on the sorting, we were also down people on pulling the pallets out to the floor.

So, I had a full pallet for one department that needed to be taken because I couldn’t stack anything more on the top and keep it stable. So I ended up with boxes on the floor beside me in a pile because I had to grab them but didn’t have anywhere for them to go.

At the same time, one of my others had been pulled… but they hadn’t brought back an empty one. Usually there are spares not too far away to be able to grab one… but they had been used, and hadn’t been replaced because the guys were behind. There were more down in another part of the back room, but being already behind, I couldn’t get away long enough to grab them without being massively behind and having way too much slide past.

And so I had those stacked on the other side waiting for a place to go too.

And so of course right about this time is when these two departments started getting slammed.

And so I’m pulling things that I have nowhere for them to go, and still behind, and one of the guys who likes to be a jerk when we get behind and shove the boxes as hard as he can where they have nowhere to go does his thing.

Most of the time, the worst that happens when he pulls this is that they jam together so hard that it makes them really hard to get your hands in to grab them, thus making it even harder to get caught back up. Occasionally if things aren’t lined up well it will make a whole section of boxes fly off the conveyor.

But neither of those happened today.

Today, I had two grocery boxes that had round items in them, so the walls of the boxes weren’t very well supported by the goods inside.

And so when he pushed, they broke from the pressure.

And so when I picked them up, I then had an entire case of cans of pringles, and an entire case of bottles of syrup, completely out of their boxes and rolling everywhere.

Only made worse by the two piles of homeless boxes.. which made it hard to even get to them to try to clean them up.

The mess was pretty huge.

It’s actually the first time I’ve seen the line stop when something has made a mess. Even when there was a large puddle of laundry soap, it just got worked around and cleaned up as it could be as life went on.

I was very near tears of frustration.

Fortunately, two of the guys did jump in to help get things back settled again.

—

Ironically, miss critical said nothing of the chaos… even though she was nearby at the time.

Something tells me if she has any say in who gets kept from the seasonal workers, I’m doomed. Even though several of the others don’t even have to work the truck unloads and do the hard part of the day, they just do the easier shelf stocking in the larger departments.

Days like today make me sort of hope that I don’t get kept on though. Or consider asking a doctor for a lifting restriction to get me pulled off of the line after I do get hired.

About all that I can say at this point is that I’m doing the best that I can with the circumstances I’ve got. I do ok when they are mellow, but not so much the more they get crazy.

I just wish they’d put some of the more experienced guys who roll their eyes at the newer workers into the harder places, and put those of us who are newer into the easier areas.

Ended up having to drop one of the two jobs, basically in the name of sanity.

–

Job A is going ok. It’s not bad most of the time, just very physical… a sort of a different change from most of my other jobs that haven’t been very physical tiring but either mentally tiring, or as an introvert being a drain on energy.

The shelf stocking aspect isn’t bad, mostly there’s 2 or 3 of us working in an area, but working mainly independent of each other. Mostly a quiet, left to thoughts and physical task sort of thing.

The sorting boxes onto as they come of the truck really varies by what area you are working in, and how well staffed things are to be able to keep up with the pacing. And has a lot more interaction with the other workers… several of which seem to have chips on their shoulders in general, and several more of which don’t seem to be fans of either seasonal workers or new people and i guess have forgotten they were new once too.

The worst thing about it is the hours… originally they were starting at 6am, but then closer to holidays got moved to 4am. 4am is crazy time to be getting up and functioning.

While not mentioned in the hiring process, it does actually have cross training on cashier too.. having your second day cashiering be an 8 hour shift on black friday starting at 1am is interesting to say the least, but not nearly as bad as I expected the shift to go!

Not too bad overall, but still, not something I particularly hope to have as a job forever. It sort of scares me a bit how many people are doing this and are 40 or 50 or 60 and have been there 7 or 10 or 22 years and are largely bitter at the many early 20’s workers and newbies.

–

Job B, the best way to describe it is that it wasn’t as described.

I’d been told it was mostly afternoons and evenings doing recovery… which at most retail stores means picking things up, refolding what needs it, straightening, and just in general putting things back to how they should be. And cross trained on cashier to be able to jump on a register when things got too busy in an area.

During training, this seemed to be what they expected it to be too…. the parts of the videos and such devoted to that area explained it as a team that came in to help get things back in order where needed earlier in the evening so it wasn’t all left until the end of the day.

In reality, there would be no afternoons, or even evenings really. The job scheduling was always to be 3 hours before the store closed and an hour and a half afterwards. Which was ok when the store closed at 9, workable at 10, but really not manageable on an everyday basis when they switched to the holiday hours.

Had they told me upfront that the set hours would be 9pm to 130am, 4 weekdays a week, for the vast majority of the time I would be there, I’d have been able to tell them upfront that wasn’t likely to work well. I don’t consider that to be the “afternoons and evenings” I’d been told at interviews and in the classroom training.

But, even had the hours matched what I was told, the job description didn’t. The only time we did actual recovery was after the store closed, when that’s what everyone was doing.

And I never saw a cash register after the classroom training.

The rest of the time was spent circling through and picking up returns and other unwanted items from the registers in each department, and essentially wandering the store until you found where it went to put it away.

Which might not have been so bad if I were familiar with all of the different departments… but this is a store where I only really shop in two of them, the clothing sizes for me and the sizes for kiddo.

And only really look at the lower end of brands.

So where my on the floor trainer could look at a pink sweatshirt and know instantly by the brands that it was mens and a more upscale brand and know roughly the area it would be in to look for it… to me that totally looked like a women’s shirt… so I was looking in womens activewear. And then just general womens. And then the women’s petites. And then juniors. I’d only eliminated older girls and plus sections by the size.

And so things were going rather poorly anyway, but when you add in a rule to ask anyone within a certain space of you if you can find something for them…. knowing there’s very little chance you are actually going to be able to find it if they say yes…

And then adding in that I pulled a muscle in my calf and was having it be really sore while walking for about 2 weeks….

I ended up quitting because I just wasn’t able to do the hours, especially when job A moved to 4am. But I can’t say I wasn’t glad to see the tasks go to.

Recovery wasn’t bad… it just wasn’t actually what the job was actually doing until the last hour and a half of the day.

So this morning, half out of needing to wake up and half to make my throat feel better, I decided to stop at a nearby gas station on the way to grab a cheap cappuccino.

So I grab my drink, and grab a muffin after suddenly remembering it would be a while till break time… and go to the cash registers.

Now, this gas station chain has a setup that’s a bit different from others. They have an L shaped counter, with 3 registers, basically one at each corner. Then they have a line at each side of each register… so up to 6 people waiting against the counter… and leave all three registers open so that however many workers they have can bounce around when someone is writing a check or something else that creates a pause.

So, between the middle register and the end one on each side, there is an open counter space where two people are next to each other.

And so that’s where I was standing… while the cashier rang up some lottery tickets on the far register… when I looked up and noticed that the person standing next to me was my former stepmom.

Wow!

She and my dad broke up when away at college, and she didn’t even come to his funeral… so the last time I’ve seen her would have been either Christmas break of 1997 or spring break of 1998.

I didn’t even know she still lived in the area… actually maybe she didn’t for a while, but her daughter still did as of a few years ago.

I just stood there…silently shocked… and the only thing came to my mind was “You still exist?”

Ok, so of course I knew she existed… but it was just such a weird disconnect.

—

After my dad’s funeral, my brother had made a comment that if she’d shown up he’d have had a few things to say to her with dad not around… and I had a few I would have added myself. Where as most of my mom’s relationships were at worst just tolerant of us kids, this lady pretty much did her best to drive a wedge between us and my dad any way that she could.

Yes, I know… I’m probably attributing move evil to her intentions than may have really been there… and there was a lot that my dad should have done to step in on our behalf that didn’t happen.

But when you tell a 16 year old and a 14 year old that are supposed to have Christmas with their dad that they can’t see him anytime that weekend because you want it to be a special time for your kids (who would have been 14 and 13 or so, and lived with them full time)…

then when we do see him two weekends later we get $5 gift certificates “from him” written in female writing with my name spelled wrong, while her kids show off the $200 boomboxes they got “from him“ that she later brags about picking out the best? (Mom was in nursing school at the time… not an other income question… and she’s made it pretty clear that she was the one who chose their gifts from him at the very least… if not outright bought them for him)

And how our bedroom got turned into her ”sewing“ room too…. then to just her sewing room… and then the closet-type space under the eaves where our folding beds had been moved got turned into a room for her exercise stuff that never got used… and then our folding beds disappeared completely because her older daughter borrowed them for camping and kept them (even though they were dads originally), but she didn’t want the couches to get messed up from people sleeping on them… so that we slept on the floor about twice and then were told we couldn’t stay overnights at all… And then to being told that they were just too busy to have ”company“ most weekends…

Unfortunately, the list could go on quite a bit…. but to say that there was bad blood between her and us would be an understatement.

—

But… kind of amazingly… nothing at all came to me in the way of bitterness as we stood there while the lady at the other end bet a small fortune. Just sort of a weird shocked feeling that old paths didn’t end when they’ve been long out of sight.

It never even occurred to me to say any of the things that I probably would have said years earlier. It wasn’t until hours later, as I telling someone about it, that I even realized that I’d had the perfect chance to do so.

But then, neither did it come to mind to say hello and have a normal adult conversation either.

—

She hadn’t looked up at me during the time while we waited… and it had been so long I wasn’t even sure if she would recognize me even if she’d noticed me before I noticed her.

But then, after she’d made her purchase, she turned and shot me a deliberate look… that I’m not even sure how to describe exactly.. and turned her back towards me sharply with an audible huff, and did this flouncing away thing.

I laughed. Without even thinking about it… it was just that randomly and abruptly over the top and totally out of the blue as to make it comical… and it just sort of came out before I could have stopped myself had I tried.
Someone behind us in line wondered aloud ”What was that all about?“ and the cashier just sort of shook his head and shrugged.

Out in the parking lot a minute or so later, she was waiting for a car to pass to leave the pump as I was getting into my car near the door…. and she made a big production of all but squealing her tires as she left, going way too fast for a parking lot and making overly wide swerves that came pretty close to a poor car trying to pull in.

—

Apparently her feelings were not quite as mellowed to pretty much neutral surprise? LOL

Dunno if that was about me…
Or about dad (contact with my dad and i had broken down enough I’m honestly not even sure why they broke up… he had a new and much much nicer live-in gf by the time I moved home… so i’m not sure if I even asked back then even…)
Or a comparison with her kids (at least one of which has done jail time, and at least one of which was a high school dropout)…
Or just a bad day….
Or if she’s really just always that much of a witch…

But I’m really really glad that I’m on my side of the fence and not hers.

Though as amusing as the random harsh reaction was… I’m thinking I’ll be avoiding coffee from that particular place at that time in the mornings!

It’s still there, and still looking very much dead.

But this year has been an interesting year for trees. (There’s a sentence ya don’t use much… lol)

First in regards to my one original tree… in spite of this being a really really hot and really dry year, it seems like the little tree hit itself a growth spurt and never looked back! Seems like it went from tiny to good sized while my back was turned!

And then, this fall, it had another trick up its sleeve… it turned red!! Previous years the leaves have just been a darkish brownish… something that was a contrast to the neighbors nearest tree that turned a pretty orange. But this year…. instead of going straight to dark brown…. they are stopping at a pretty dark red!

(this was mid-change… almost all of the leaves are the darker red color now)

No idea how exactly that happens… wonder whether it means the tree is healthier, or has too little water, or who knows what. Maybe the leaves just dropped too fast in previous years… as it’s not in as big of a hurry to shake them off this year either where last year they were gone almost as soon as the green left.  But very cool!

Also very cool….

Where this summer was so hot and dry, the lawn died really early… like june instead of august… and then came back to life about the time school started.

So, I wasn’t mowing very much during the main part of the summer…. but when I was, it was hotter than normal, and I’m not a fan of weed eating and trimming anyway, so it got skipped a lot more than it ideally should have.

I mention this to explain how I could walk outside in September and notice that I have volunteer trees growing against my shed that were nearly waist high!

They’d sort of mixed in with the weeds earlier in the year when they didn’t get chopped off, and then when all the grass died, I wasn’t out there messing with things to pay attention.

They’ve grown about a foot since I first noticed them…. making the tallest two only about 18 inches shorter than the dead tree of spite.

There are two of them growing right next to each other right at the corner of the shed that faces the back of the house, and then on the other side, there is one in about the same spot on that corner, and one a little in front of it closer to the entrance of the shed. This last one is the one I’m not sure how well it will do… but the others seem to be doing great.

Not the ideal places I would have planted them…. but then, the shed gives them some support from wind and such….
And this is an old beat up shed that leaks bad from hail damage and was supposed to have been replaced with my awnings after the insurance company had paid for them, but my stepdad decided not to. So, I’m not too concerned about any damage the trees might later cause it… as it can’t hold anything that can’t get wet anyway and already needs replaced.

And then there is my bush.

You didn’t know I had a bush? Well, neither did I.

Again, this was a sparse year for weed eating. I’d chopped off this large weed several times last summer… and it was one of the ones with a strong stalk to where it was hard to get to chop.

So I didn’t spend too much time on it at the start of this summer. I was aware it was there, but not too concerned.

Nor was I really bothered when it was about halfway to my knee.

When I noticed it had gotten big and was about knee high, I sprayed it with weed killer… knowing it was a pain to chop. But failed to notice that it failed…

Until one day I went out there… and found myself looking at a large chest-high bush!!!
(This really sounds bad for my skills of observation and my back yard… but really… it grew very fast!!)

It too apparently likes low water and warm temps.

Which made me wonder…. was this something that was supposed to be there? Maybe it was an intentional plant that I was a doof and just kept killing each year instead of letting it grow.

Because this sucker was huge!!! And no other weeds in the yard were even remotely close to being halfway to knee even…

So asked around… and found out that this is polkweed. Some consider it a weed, but then, some places sell it as a normal plant from a nursery.

So, since it was the only thing green in my yard by this point, I let it stay. Well, plus, it was a lot easier than figuring out how to deal with this giant thing!

So I now have a random bush against the garage. It got berries on it a while after this pic was taken.

So my yard has been thriving in the way of large vegetation… even in the middle of a really hot and dry summer.

But I have one more tree to introduce to you… this one belonging to my stepdad, as mentioned in the dead tree of spite story.

A family member of mine has renamed this tree “the dead tree of karma”