With Distinction....

Somewhere around February Oldest had a breakdown thinking he was going to fail one class this semester, something about concrete structures?, I don't know.  Anyway, he was a mess.  This of course led him down the rabbit hole of having to spend a ton more money and time finishing up his degree. 

In March, the company he's been working for 90 minutes from the house (one way) made him a job offer to stay on after graduation. They counterered back and forth for a bit and the end number wasn't enough to allow him to move out that way and pay his student loans. So now, on top of the potential failure, he had to find a new job. 

At the start of April, overwhelmed, he took some time off to finish some assignments, work on exams and generally reclaim some mental health time. I asked him if he had seen any of his grades.  He mumbeled something and said it was "fine". He worked on his resume, interviewed with two companies close to home, and waited to hear. The first offer came in solid, benifits that rival my federal ones, and an overall good atmosphere.  Thinking he'd take it, he attended the second interview out of courtesy, expecting them to not match the other company's package. Except they matched it, and came in 18K higher. 

Having tallied his student loan debt, his car payment, and his incredibly healthy (aka expensive) eating habits, the Mom in me screamed TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN but he did not. Instead he countered the first company, who came back within 2K of the second company's offer, and offered 5K per year for the next 6 years, tax free, towards his school loans. Needless to say, his starting pay is more than what 25 years in the Federal government get you.

With a job secured, he kept plugging away, freaking out over surprise last minute papers and oral presentations. 

Last week I asked if his grades were in.  

No. They post after graduation.

Then how will you know if you're graduating?

It's fine. *eye rolls* I'm going to graduate.

Saturday we headed into the big city in the pouring rain, traversing the campus one last time, found our seats, and watched him cross the stage one last time, as he recieved his Masters in Civil Engineering,

With Distinction.

Apparently, the boy who insisted he would catastrophicly fail two months prior, graduated in the top 10% of his class.

With Distinction Indeed.

Fresh Starts...

I was given another old trunk by an old friend of my husband. It wasn't in the roughest shape, but it definitely wasn't useable. I began the stripping down process months ago in the hopes that I would be able to give it to my nephew for his High School graduation in June.  Last week I finished the cedar lining and the polyurethane on the trunk, and today I sealed the tray.  The finishing touch is the trunk lid which will be lined with his gradfather's old flannel shirts, quilted together. They are very close, and someday, when my Dad is gone, it will be nice for him to have them in his legacy trunk along with his scout gear, hockey jerseys, cap, gown, and diploma. While I have gotten rid of the musty smell from the orignial paper lining, and the deep down greasy dirt of the oil cloth exterior, many of the flaws are still visible.  The patent on the lock, which had been cut, goes back to the 1860's, and rather than replace it, I polished the brass highlighting it. The flaws give it character and tell the history of where it's been. 

About four years ago, before they were insanely popular, I bought a Blackstone flat top grill. Being cast iron it was very expensive, but came preseasoned, which was great becasue I literally knew nothing about cast iron. Fast forward four years, my inexperience and laziness has left it a mess, partially seasoned, and beginning to rust. So, in between poly coats on the trunk tray, and after a deep dive of how-to videos on Youtube, I took the grill down to bare meatal and began the painstaking process of reseasoning.  It took about an hour to strip it back, and about two hours to slowly reseason. My neglect took a lot of dirty, hard work to repair. Is it perfect? No. But the surface is slick with no sticky points, and I feel like I can maintain and build on the seasoning over the coming months. 

Last year, in a moment of utter disgust, I decided we needed a better way of keeping the spare rolls of TP in the office bathroom than a half tray on the floor, so I took an old nightstand that my Dad had made and we weren't using, and brought it in. It served it's purpose well for months until one of the maintenence people decided to move it directly under the papertowel dispenser where water dripped on it all day.  The water casued mold, and it deteriorated quickly. A few weeks ago I realized that no one had been moving it when they waxed the floor and it was now anchored to the floor. *insert a loud sigh and eye roll here* With one quick jolt I freed it from it's prison, brought it home, and started the painstaking job of stripping it down.  About an hour into sanding I could hear my dad's voice saying that's never going to come out, but I persisted nonetheless, the whole while cursing myself for bringing it in in the first place.

The day was a slow moving back and forth from project to project, just me and my thoughts, consequences and regreats.

The trunk sat negected for years before someone insisted it be appreciated.

The Blackstone laid shoved aside and uncared for months.

The nightstand was cast aside, it's value disrespected, until someone had had enough.

Kind of like me.

For years I negected myself, putting everyone else first, hiding myself away in the corner. I did not always treat myself well, ignoring small things until they became big things, finding myself in places I didn't belong, for far too long.

Until one day I had had enough. I jolted myself free from the neglect that held me in place for so long, stripping myself down to figurative bare metal, and resasoning myself at my core. No more dark corners, wrong places, or negect. And while some of the scars can never be erased, I am learning to be appreciated, cared for, and to find beauty in the scars my choices have left behind.

Dullards? Dullster? It's All Quite Mundane, Really.

 Facebook's algorithms have suggested that I might like the social groups Dull Women and Dull Men of Face Book.  Apparently you can be a member of both, regardless of gender, and it monopolizes half of my feed. While I have not committed to either of these groups, I do enjoy many of the non-introductory stories posted.  Some of which are neither dull or mundane, but just rather ordinary. They are stories from all over the world, which is kind of cool, to see how others spend their everyday. And of course, they all end with an age, a shoe size (???), and occasionally, a banana for scale.

I could get offended, but I know that I am more than just a FB algorithm, and that I am more than just the sum of my posted adventures on the book of faces.

Oh, who am I kidding?

This morning I posted two indentical bottles of Paul Mitchell's "The Conditioner" side by side, one that actually conatined the correct product, and the other containing shampoo, with the caption YOU HAD ONE JOB PAUL MITCHELL. 

Alas, my wanderlust has all but come to a scheeching halt, spending every remaing day with the old girl, who can barely walk most days and today is struggling with her basic bodily functions.  The Hubs is on his way home from work, searching the grocery stores for rotisserie chicken, in a last ditch attempt to get things moving for her. He even went so far as to invest in a red light laser therapy unit as a last ditch attempt to give her some relief. If her behavior was consistant, we'd be more seriously discussing options, but it's not. She'll decline for days and then suddenly act puppy like, forver keeping us guessing and in an eternal loop of unconditional love and guilt over the ineveitable. 

I have worked 6 days a week for the last six weeks.  Assuming today would be no different, I had nothing planned for my day off and awaited the phone call which thankfully did not come. I spent the day working on another 100 year old trunk for my nephew's high school graduation, doing laundry, running lunch to Youngest who woke up late and left with no lunch or snacks for his double shift today. 

But, prehaps the highlight of the day was when I dismantled our Dyson vacuum and ran it through the dishwasher, rendering most of the pieces as clean as the day it was bought, and I found replacement filters for it for only $12. They are due to arrive on Saturday, along with the replacement blubs for my patio lights (we currently have four out), and the prismatic film for my sun roof in the car.  Becasue while I do love the idea of a sunroof, the summer sun beating through it all day, every day, is just too much. I could just close the visor but then what's the point of even having it? It's quite a conundrum. 

Upon further reflection there may be something to the algorithm. 

But Dull?

I prefer dangerously unexciting.

How Do You Eat An Elephant?

 Someone asked me this once.   

I thought it was the weirdest question.

I  mean who would want to eat an elephant?

I have still yet to fix my spell checking issues with my keyboard.  Something about the tablet having capabilities, but not the keyboard? I dunno. Just work with me here, mkay?

As it stands we are 13 months into the dog's Cushing's diagnosis. Typical life expectancy is 12-24 months once diagnosed, and we suspect she's  had it for about three years or so. She's slowed down considerably.  Her 3-4 walks of 2+ miles a day now consist of maybe a quarer of a mile each. She struggles to get up and down.  Her tail, when considerably excited, wags at haft mast. She'll muster up an occasionsal "look at me I'm terrifing" jump at a neighborhood dog here and there but then it takes her twice as long to meander home. Too make matters worse, I did my annual check in of my finances and tallied what this whole thing has cost over the last year.

$12K in vet bills.

$300 monthly in medications and supplements.

$600 monthly in food.

I'd spend it all again of course, but hope I don't have to, since I didn't have it to spend in the first place. The shear amont of debt is overwhelming and while there's a plan in place it will take some time to execute it.

Youngest has returned from Arizona.  He went to visit some friends and to check out ASU. He'd toyed with going there to get a sense of the climate and people, but with no assiatance for gap year students, and FAFSA not recognizing him as an independent adult until he's 24, at 50K a year it's just too far out of reach. We've done some research into schools in Puerto Rico, and while extremely affordable, the aspect of becoming bilingual is daunting for him. He's left one of his jobs in order to persue his certified personal training career. Building clientele is tough. Doing it while suffering from debilitating seasonal depression is tougher. It's overwhelming. He will get to where he wants to be if he sticks with it, but it's a lot.

Oldest graduates with his Master's degree in 5 weeks. We've tallied his debt as well. The number is staggering. The plan has always been to live at home while he fast tracked his way through paying it off. He has been working with a company three days a week who has given him a job offer to stay on after graduation, but they are a 90 minute commute from here, one way, and the drive is mentally killing him. He can move closer, but that changes his financial plan considerably, and as we all know, once school debt takes hold, it's brutal to get out from under it. He's updating his resume tonight and will start looking again for more local opportunities. The task is daunting, depressing, but necessary.

The husband has 862 days left until he can retire. He loathes going to work every day. The atmosphere is terrible. He's wishing the days away. One day at a time.

How I wished I could return to y'all with happier, more pleasant affairs. Yet I have all these elephants in the room with me. Which brings me back to the original question, if someone wanted to, how would one eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

If you Give A Girl....

 If you give a girl a brand new trainee the week of Christmas, she'll probably think her boss was crazy. When she tells you to give her the tools to do it correctly, her bosses will object.  She will definitely give them hell, and get her way, and becasue of that her trainee will stay for the full three weeks of training. And by the end of the month, he will be ready and she can take some time off.

If you give a girl some time off, she will proabbly find things to do, since she only had two days off the entire month of December. And since, during the month of December, Oldest totaled his car (he's fine, but the air bags went off and that deemed it totaled), and has now incurred a car payment, he's discovered he may have to live with you forever. Embracing his new fated doom, he will decide to move his room into the basement where her craft and the husband's sports card room is. 

So, since the girl has time off, she will move all of her stuff out of the space, and build out some walls and closet space. There will be drywall, and dry wall mudding, and dust, and primer, and trim work, and paint. Lots of paint. And Oldest will love it all. The husband will love his new card room upstairs. The dog, who always refused to go downstairs, will love that she can see him now while he puts together a card order to go out. And the girl will love that everyone is happy, even though all her craft stuff is still yet to be organized.

If you give the girl enough time off to build out a room, she will proabbly work on laundry while she's in the basement, and she will discover why the laundry overflow keeps randomly overflowing into the newly finished laundy/bathroom. With another day off, she'll rig something ridiculous to keep it from getting everywhere, since there's no easy way to stop it from happening. When her husband sees the trash bag, funnel and hose combination that leaves not a trace of water on the floor, he will proclaim that that is the most redneck invention he's ever seen.

He will also proclaim her a genius.

By the fifth day off, the girl will realize why it's important to wear a mask while sanding drywall and trim boards as her sinuses flare up into the worst head cold imaginable. She will of course, suck it up and go to work on the 6th and 7th day, hauling mail in the snow, sleet, and frozen tundra, thus making her sicker, which is why, she will get two more days off. 

On that day off she will realize that if she takes enough cold medicne she can conquer the world. Or at least more laundry, and a small closet space for Youngest. And by the last day off she will attempt to get spell check installed on her new tablet.

And, if she's sucessful, she'll most likely want a cookie.

Edited to add: After several attempts and a deep dive on Google, spell check is not going to happen. You'll just have to disregard my fat fingers. Also, I totally ate two cookies anyway.