Undoing what you redid so you can redo it again

I broke up with him.

Never in a million years would I have thought that I'd do it. I love him. I let myself dream about - with - him.

And I ended it.

I had good reasons.

But it hurts. God, it hurts.

I've never been the type of girl who really cries much. Even after my dad died I didn't cry very much. Not like I have for the past two weeks. For the first week it was every day. At random. Tears and gut wrenching sobs. My dog got scared and hid in his crate. The cat would just sit on me and purr. It's a little better now, I'm able to quash the tearing, take a few deep breaths and go about my day.

I've tried to distract myself. Working twelve hour shifts helps. And it's busy, so there's not much time to think about how I don't have someone to share "I love you" texts with anymore. I have the most amazing friends in the world who have worked to distract me and give me people and places to hang with. Brand new apartment with no memories of him hiding around random corners. And I gave back everything he ever gave me - down to the dried roses and little notes. Deleted all pictures, erased all text messages. The only reason I didn't delete his number was so I could set calls straight to voicemail and avoid hearing his voice.

Not that he left messages the two times he called. Which is just further confirmation regarding the rightness of my decision.

Sigh.

And I have to figure out what I'm doing for a job in four weeks.

I don't want to. I don't care.

I have professional burnout on top of a shattered heart and it's not very conducive to having ambition of any sort.

Sigh and ugh.

Questions

I have a habit of continually asking the wrong question.

When I was getting ready to finish high school, I went between "do I go to this school, or that school?!" and I would debate the pros and cons in my head with this circular reasoning that always ended up with me finally falling asleep with "this is my final decision. I'm going there." Only to wake up, go through my day and head back to bed debating it all over again, only this time ending with "this is my final decision. I'm going here."

It went on like that for months.

And then, once the decision was made and I was sitting in my dorm, I would go back and wonder if I'd really made the right decision. Most of the time, I concluded that I had, though to this day, part of me truly wonders. I missed out on a lot because of the distance I created between myself and my family. I'm still missing out on a lot.

Then again, I've had many opportunities that I would otherwise never have known about, let alone had the chance to experience.

Years later, I had this stunning realization:  I never considered the question I was asking, because I was so focused on getting an answer. Maybe I shouldn't have been asking "which college should I go to" but "should I go to college at all?"

I was recently offered a job that I really want.

I turned it down, after doing a lot of the afforementioned late night questioning/decision making.

What if I was asking the wrong question entirely?

Blahhhhhhh

I finished my contract in Montana, drove 16 hours straight to MN, met my boyfriend at the "historic" train depot in my hometown at nearly 2 in the morning, did the whole "meet the parents...and sisters...and brother...and sister-in-law and nephew" thing for the first time in my life (not nervewracking while sleep deprived, nooooo, not at all) moved all of my various life collectibles out of my townhouse, traipsed cross country to see one of my best friends EVER, booked it back to VA where my planned housing had fallen through, set up in an extended stay hotel and started a new job at an insanely busy hospital that blows away any place I've previously worked, let alone the remote place in which I just spent six months, and yesterday bid farewell to the man I've fallen in love with for six weeks while he goes off to learn more about blowing things up while avoiding getting blown up himself.

I also, apparently, did little to curb my tendency toward run-on sentences.

Lack of sleep is not good for my ability to process things. And I've had a lot to process.  The job is crazy. I'm not sure if this contracting thing is what I want to do or not, given the experiences I've had. But I'm more than willing to stick it out for the next 10 weeks - I think that's the best part of it. Thirteen weeks is actually a very short amount of time - especially when your shifts are busy. And the money is good. I dunno. We'll see. I need to make some financially solid decisions.

The whole relationship thing is...so different from what I've ever anticipated. I've always thought that I wanted to be with a military guy because, hey, benefits without the hassle. Have the guy, don't have to put up with him being around all the time. Still free to do what I want, when I want.  Until I meet someone that I actually WANT to be around almost all the time. And of course, he has to leave when I'm all hormonal, so I'm a very uncharacteristic teary mess, which just frustrates me even more, increasing my teariness. Ugh.

Fortunately I have a cuddly dog, a crazy cat and really good friends in this area.

That last part could be another factor in my decision regarding career placement.

Have I ever told you that I think too much?

Well, it happened

Yep. It's true. The Ice Queen has melted.

I'm falling in love.

And I totally just had a giggle fit after writing that. I'm sorry. It's probably good that I don't live around anyone who knows me, because I think I might be nauseating :-P

Anyway, yeah, after all of my protesting and lamenting and questioning and othering, God was writing a love story after all.

And it's pretty incredible. I gotta say.

Being in a relationship - especially a long distance relationship - is challenging me in ways that being single never did. As a single woman, I've learned to be self sufficient. To be strong and tackle problems on my own and be my own advocate. That's not what loving someone is about. Love is about trust. Relying on someone else to be there. To follow through with what they say they'll do. (I think I have more control freak in me than I realized or admitted, actually.) Trusting someone doesn't come easily to me. Trusting someone who says I'm amazing and beautiful and the love of his life is . . . freakin' hard. I want to laugh it off and say "that's nice." But I can't not believe him. And that's scary.

Fortunately he's patient. And kind. And a lot of other really good things to me :)

Because Prohibition Worked SO Well

There is a lot of chatter out there about the Second Amendment, Obama's executive orders, or purported orders, regarding firearms laws, restrictions and the like, psychiatry, national security, school security, and everything in between in recent days. Individual states are coming up with their own versions of increasingly restrictive firearms regulations and any outcry against that is dismissed as right wing extremism.

It shouldn't need to be said, but stating the obvious is something I'm good at, so: the events that took place in Connecticut last December are nothing short of horrendous.

And they have nothing to do with firearms law.

Guessing that second statement is going to lose me a few friends :-P

The reactionary statements demanding more gun control, fewer high capacity magazines, bans on certain types of firearms, better background checks are just that: reactionary. They have no teeth when it comes to actually preventing the acts of evil and demented people

Sorry, guys. The world's a screwed up, messy place. Bad stuff happens. Kids starve to death every day. Babies are abandoned to die because they're female. Children are sold into sexual slavery. A few words on some paper, signed by the all of the dignitaries in the world, are not going to fix that.
And new, stricter, gun control laws are not going to prevent someone from committing further tragedies in another elementary school, or a middle school, or a playground, or anywhere else where groups of tiny humans get together and think they're safe.

It's an old adage, but it's true: if you make guns illegal, then only criminals will have guns.  I don't know how to get this thought to actually engage in the minds of society at large, but the fact is that people who don't care about the legality of their actions are not going to suddenly change their minds when you pass a new law.  Seriously.  If you speed when the speed limit is 60, why would you suddenly decide to slow down when the sign changes to 55?

Laws do not inhibit the actions of people. People inhibit their actions.  We all have a choice to make every day.

This blog was actually mostly inspired by a "quote" from George Washington that I ran across earlier today - it wasn't an actual quote, but there is an actual quote from which it stems:
A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well digested plan is requisite: And their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others, for essential, particularly for military supplies.

I expect that most people will simply dismiss that as antiquated and possibly even too complicated to understand, or at least no longer a necessary thought.

I'll simply state that America today is barely armed, regardless of what the left would have you believe. If it came down to it, an uprising could be quashed in less than 48 hours by military forces without much difficulty. Weapons technology is leaps and bounds above what even the most hardcore militia has access to (interesting, when you consider the purpose of the second amendment...)

Of greater concern, however, is the lack of discipline we have. We are well on our way to over half of our population being obese. I'm a member of that statistic. Not something I'm proud of, but true nonetheless at this point.

There are no fat revolutionaries, which brings me back to my Zombieland manifesto on life:

Rule #1: Cardio
Rule #2: Double tap

Just out of sight

Yesterday, I went exploring.

First, I brought my car to a body shop for an estimate (it was vandalized last week) On the way, I noticed some pretty intense icicles near an historic landmarker. I decided to stop by on my way back to take a closer look.

 I should mention that these things are HUGE. Well over my head. Once I got out of the car, I noticed that the landmark was actually for a Spring. And the woods were pretty much alive with the sounds of running water with more icicles and awesomeness to explore.  I don't know what it is about rocks and water that just demand attention...but I embrace their demands. While I played mountain goat, I saw some pretty awesome stuff....

Snowy moss and lichens

A single snowflake caught on a strand of spider's web. I seriously need an actual camera instead of my phone . . .

The view from the height of my exploration

And my trail back down.

I go back to work tomorrow...settling into a regular schedule from now until mid December - Wednesday through Saturday 10 hour shifts with Sunday through Tuesday off to recoup, explore and wrangle my critters. I actually left Rocky free to roam the apartment when I went to the landromat today. I came home to no disasters! Aside from a bath towel mysteriously on the kitchen floor, my dynamic duo seemed to stay out of trouble. Of course, now that George has figured out how to get onto the fridge, there's no telling what sorts of things will happen . . .:-P

Note the computer power cord running through the door handle. Yeah. Not only is cell signal limited in here, but there's a shortage on outlets. . .

Culture Shock

I knew when I moved to Minnesota from Virginia (affectionately…or not…known as “yuppieville”) that there would be differences to which I would need to adjust. I was right. The east coast go-go-go is not so readily embraced in the mid-west. There’s time to think. Time to enjoy being alive. Time to not sit in traffic on 495 for hours on end.

Even so, it wasn’t a huge adjustment. Minnesota is home. It’s always been home. I know the lifestyle there. I just had to learn a different hospital, different ER, different set of protocols.

Contrast that with the move to Montana.

Dear goodness.

IV setups are completely different. We do not use extension sets at all. Just the hub on the catheter. Boom. They also use a different sort of IV catheter than I’ve ever used…fortunately veins are the same.

The hospital is small, so the ER doc is the admitting doc. They write the admission orders when they get to it, and then the patient is transferred to the floor. Which is actually called the “ward”

The biggest difference of all, though, is there is NO DILAUDID.

None.

Zilch.

Zippo.

You may now cue the Hallelujah Chorus.

There are other differences. I’m sure I’ll end up writing about them at some point, but they aren’t really forefront to my brain at the moment.

Yesterday I went to Kalispell – it’s a really cool city. I might actually look for a permanent job there, since there’s a bigger hospital. I explored their outdoor gear store and got a pair of North Face hiking boots on clearance - $120 down to $60. Score one for awesome. It started to snow around 5, so I decided to head back to the apartment (a 2 hour drive through the mountains along Glacier National Park) The roads were pretty decent and there was still some daylight, so about half way home, I stopped at a river access and took Rocky for a 30 minute hike. It was absolutely gorgeous. And Rocky loved the chance to run around.

I have yet to see much wildlife around here. A patient told me about the cow elk he shot, but I haven’t seen anything besides a few mule deer – and that was on the drive out here.

The rest of the drive home was slightly more treacherous, though my car handles snowy conditions like a champ. Even so, I didn’t really hear much of the audio book I downloaded for the long trips for groceries – Stephen Abrose’s “Undaunted Courage” the story of Lewis and Clark.

Today I dug out my car to trek to the post office and the Laundromat, cleaned the apartment (I got a hand vacuum yesterday: 1 dog + 1 cat + small apartment = fur everywhere :-P) and now I have a honey mustard chicken and rice cooking in my cast iron skillet – complete with lid, for my wondering mother ;-)

More adventures to come – after two night shifts…which are kinda adventures themselves….