If you missed my email, the anxiety from my last post was because of an interview.  I still haven’t heard anything back from that, but I didn’t expect to until late this week or next week.  I’m not sure how good my chances are, but I’ll be sure to let you know when I know something.

I’ve found a gym to replace the one near my house that closed.  There’s a YMCA near work that has a deal with employees.  It’s a little further away from the house, but it’s significantly cheaper.  And they do offer a Zumba class on Wednesdays at 5:30.  So I’m heading there after work on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the foreseeable future.  It’s not bad!  And I get home for the evening earlier since I’m going directly to the gym and then going home, instead of the other way around.

I’m going to a symposium for work.  I don’t know how I managed to score an invitation – no one has admitted nominating me.  But it’s in Orlando in a fancy, swanky hotel and all my expenses are paid and I get paid to be there and the talks are all about Lean and process improvement and I’m very excited about the whole thing.  Justin’s coming with me because he can stay in the hotel for free and only have to pay for his food and he’ll just bring the netbook and work from the hotel.  He doesn’t get to come to the fancy dinner at the end of the symposium, and that’s a bummer, but it’ll be wonderful to have him there.

From the symposium, we’ll drive up to Luke’s wedding.  We’ll actually spend Monday – Wednesday night at the symposium, Thursday night at a hotel on the road, Friday and Saturday night at a place near the wedding, and Sunday night at another hotel on the road.  We won’t stay in our own bed for a week!  But looking at the price of tickets (greater than $500) and the price of hotels and gas (less than $500), we decided to take the less expensive way, even through the drive will be really long.  It’s going to be interesting!  And the wedding is going to be awesome!

Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep up with tasks at work.  There are a lot of projects to complete in the next couple weeks and I expect them to stack up more than they’re already stacked.  It’s just the way things go.  “Oh?  You’re busy?  Let me give you more to do!”

But it’s not bad!  In the evenings, Justin and I might make dinner together and watch an episode of Pushing Daisies or Eureka, both excellent shows if you’re not familiar with them.  Or we’ll poke at our computers and relax.  His work stuff is going slower than we’d like, just because people are slower at responding to requests for information than we’d prefer.  But we’re still optimistic about how it’s going to work in the end.  Things might be tight right now, but life is still so much better than it was when he was working for the Awful Place.

So life is good!  Busy!  But we make time to relax and maintain our sanity.  Before money got tight, we bought a year-pass to a beach not far from here, and we might head up there this weekend.  It’s a great way to get away from it all for a while, and then I sleep for the rest of the afternoon because it’s exhausting!

It’s a great life!

My handsome and supportive husband actually walked me out to my car this morning.  If that’s not love, I don’t know what is!  He got up, helped me collect all my stuff, walked me out to my car, gave me a hug and a kiss, and stood there waving until I drove away.  And then he put the recycling out for the trash guys to collect.  I am a lucky, lucky girl, people!

I spent my morning trying to figure out what it was I was stressing out about before I left in June.  Lucky for me, I’m an efficient person and I left myself notes.  “Do this first!”  Unfortunately, I’m more efficient than the people who are preparing the data I’m now waiting to review.  It makes for a slow day, which, actually, would be a great way to get back into the work world.

Know what makes it less so?  Getting nerve-wracking news slightly before noon that I can’t talk about on here and I can’t stop thinking about.  News that’s going to take up most of my evening and keep me awake with anxiety and resolve itself either in part or in whole tomorrow afternoon.  (No, I’m not pregnant.  Stop it.)

I’ll write about it eventually, but for now I’m just going to be frustratingly oblique.  So why bother even mentioning it?  Because I can’t stop thinking about it!!

So nervous!  So anxious!  So . . . TOMORROW!  Gah!

A little flashback for a minute here:  Justin quit his job on June 23rd.  He handed in his resignation, effective immediately.  He said that he’d help wrap up a few projects, but that he was done.  Not working for them anymore.  Q-U-I-T-T-I-N-G.

He worked on projects for them a little bit for the next week and then we went out of town for a week.  And then he spent a little more time late last week working on things for them.  But the whole time, he’s been pushing that he’s done.  He’s not doing projects; he’s wrapping up stuff and he’s gone.  On, I think it was Friday, they brought him a hard-drive to put files onto so he could give them projects from his home computer and wrap up that stuff.  Monday, he had other work, and they knew about it, so he didn’t answer when they called.  Fourteen times.  When he did call them, he offered to get the drive back to them, but they didn’t want to come pick it up that day.

You can see where this is going, right?

People from his former employment (either the boss and a coworker or just the coworker, I’m not sure) pounded on our front door Wednesday morning for TWO HOURS.  That’s two full hours of knocking and pounding and yelling at the house, interspersed with moments of quiet when I’d sit there hoping that they’d finally gone away.  Oh, heck no, I didn’t open the door!  When people pound like that on my door, I’m not opening it up!  No, no.  I hid up in my bedroom, away from windows so they couldn’t see that I was home.  And tried to concentrate on other things than the people knocking stuff off the backside of the door because they were pounding so viciously.  People who stood outside in upper-80* weather in 85% humidity for TWO HOURS.  People who freaked me the heck out.

Also, people who are apparently a little stupid.

After 2 hours, the police showed up.  Inside my house, I was happily promising to bake cookies for the wonderful neighbor who’d had the sense to call the cops on the lady (because at that time I was sure it was just the one coworker—if the boss had been there, he’d already driven off in a huff) who was trying to break into our house by repeatedly banging on the front door.  (Why hadn’t I called the cops by then?  Good question . . . .)  Anyway, the heroic officer asked the woman for her ID, asked what was going on, and sent her away.

Sounds about right, right?

Here’s the funny part—the disgruntled ex-boss was the one who called the cops.  Yeah!  He called the local PD to come to our house to help figure out why I wasn’t answering the door!  So when the officer showed up, well, (1) the lady coworker was the only one still there because the boss left her to handle the mess and (2) the officer was not inclined to be helpful to the lady who’d been pounding on the door of what might be an empty house for 2 hours.  (Yes, I was still pretending to not be at home—don’t judge me, I was terrified!)  In fact, when the officer heard that she was trying to get back a hard-drive that she’d GIVEN to the homeowner who had offered to RETURN it, he laughed at her.  And then gave her a warning and told her to leave.

Justin sent a delightfully nasty email to his former employer and coworker later that afternoon telling them that the behavior was unacceptable and that he was done doing work for them.  Not still finishing stuff up.  DONE.  He wasn’t going to work for people who pounded on the door of his house and terrified his wife.  He would leave the hard-drive in our mailbox and they could either pick it up, or he’d destroy it.  And I’m not fully expressing the emotion that he put into his email, but he was angry.  He was Steamed with a capital S.  His protectiveness for me came out full-bore and he wrote that email like a paladin would have stormed into the dragon’s den to save the princess being held hostage.  He was really, really mad.

His coworker called crying and apologetic about the whole thing, saying that she only pounded on our door because the boss told her to do it.  To which Justin said that the Nazi’s couldn’t get away with that excuse, and neither could she.  If I had called the cops and if I had answered the door when the officer showed up, I could probably have pressed charges and then she would be the one in trouble because she was the only one still there.  I’d love to see how a judge would react if she stood up there and said, “My boss made me do it.”  That sort of thing doesn’t fly once you get over the age of, oh . . . 8 or so.

But she told Justin what had happened on her end of the story (which is how I know the cop laughed at her) and asked him to tell me that she was really sorry.  She came by this morning and collected the hard-drive (we were at the beach) and left a note on Justin’s car apologizing again (and again said she was “just doing what [she] was told”) and now we’re done.  Justin is forgoing payment for the work he did last week and we’re not having anything further to do with this company.  And people, it feels SO GOOD.

After dealing with inter-personal issues at his workplace for many, many months, he’s taken the plunge and is going to work for himself!  He went in this morning and told them that he was leaving and it has been an EXCITING and SCARY thing all at the same time.  We’re very excited about the opportunity for him to step out and open his own business.  And we’re also scared about the whole idea that there might not be anything underfoot when he steps out.  But we’re trusting that it’s going to work out!  We have plans!  Plus, Justin had a really great meeting this afternoon with a business who is going to use him as their contracted web designer (and pay him two times as much!).  And there are a few other balls that we’re trying to catch, too, but I’ll stay mum on those until we actually hear more from them.

Anyway!  I couldn’t write about it before, for obvious reasons, but now you know!  It’s kind of scary!  But Justin’s learned a lot in the two years and some that he’s been working there and we’re excited about seeing how well we can handle this on our own!

Pray for us!  We could really use it! 

I’m back on the diet again after taking about a month off to handle with stress and not logging while we had company in town.  But I’ve been logging again for 15 days now and my scale at home (that’s not terribly accurate) gave me a whole long line of 0’s on Saturday that made me very excited.  It’s gone back up a couple pounds, but that’s what happens when I sit down with a bag of M&Ms on one day and a big plate of Kung Pao chicken the next.  But I thoroughly intend for it to be back down again by Saturday.  I might not make it down the full 50 pounds before my doctor appointment at the beginning of September, but I’m going to be pretty darn close!

I don’t know exactly how much weight I’m going to end up losing in the end, but my goal right now is to get my body fat percentage down around 25%.  Wherever I land poundage-wise is where I’ll end up, but I want to get that percentage down there.  I started at 42.2%.  Right now I’m at 38.2%.  Once I get under 32%, I’ll no longer be considered “obese” and THAT will be a very happy day. 

The car thing is an end as far as I know.  I finally called the claims department on Friday to ask what the progress was on the file and they told me that they had denied the claim.  Wohoo!!  I mean, the woman didn’t have a leg to stand on but it’s still nice to have things work out the way that they’re SUPPOSED to work.  I didn’t hit her, I shouldn’t have to pay for it.  And I’m not!

As far as I’m concerned, the matter is now closed.  She can try to appeal the decision or take me to small claims court, but the insurance is going to back me up if she does that.  I’m going to assume that she’s not going to be quite that desperate and just stop thinking about the whole thing.  And now I can finally try to get the paint off my car, since I’ve been waiting until everything was resolved to try to work on that.  Before I was just being lazy.  But now I have more motivation to get it off.

There are things happening in the job front that I’m not comfortable talking about right now.  You know that feeling like if you talk about it, you might jinx the whole thing?  THAT.  But hopefully I’ll have news for you there in a while.

I am still going to be briefly unemployed while the whole place shuts down for a couple weeks, but I’m looking forward to the time away from work.  It’ll be nice.  I’m hoping to get a bunch of projects done around the house.  Because, you know, there’s nothing like a vacation to get some work done around the house.  What?  Relax?  I don’t have time to relax!

In more trivial news, I’ve developed an allergy to my face lotion.  I’ve been using it for a while and I’m about halfway through this bottle, but the last few times I tried to use it, I broke out in hives.  It wasn’t pleasant.  My only hypothesis is that there’s almond oil in the lotion.  Of my nut allergies, almonds were pretty low on the list of reactions, so I picked up a box of cranberry-pomegranate granola bars (with almonds) and was eating one of those a day.  And then I broke out in hives from my lotion.  So I’m not eating the bars any more and I’m using aloe vera to moisturize my face, since we didn’t have anything else in the house that would work.  Avoidance is effective and I’m doing just fine.  But it’s kind of a bummer because I was fond of that lotion.

And to end on a more UP tone, I have a trip coming up to visit several people and I’m SO EXCITED about it!  I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’m still just beyond thrilled to get to take this trip.  I didn’t expect to be able to spend time with my siblings and it’s going to be so much fun!  Lots of people know about it, too, because I can’t stop talking about it.  I’ve already started my packing list—I’ve been trying to figure out how to pack everything in a carry-on so we don’t have to check our luggage.

But mostly, I just think, “I get to see the kidlets!”  “I get to see my siblings!”  “I get to see Grandma!”  “I get to see the Barnetts!”  And try to figure out how I could fit seeing more people into the tiny amount of time that we’ll be in each place.  Like Sara!  And Gillian!  And Mom and Dad!!

But before that, I’ve got 3 projects that need to be completely finished up before the end of this week and 3 other documents that need to be released and mailed off for approval before next Tuesday, at the absolute latest.  I have a lot of work to finish up.

It’s been an interesting day, but in a wholly different way than yesterday.  I’m over being frustrated and scared about the whole car situation.  Now I’m upset, angry, and taking action.

There was a message on my work phone this morning when I came back from a meeting.  The Woman With The Tahoe (TWWTT) filed an insurance claim against my insurance company and they were calling to ask what was going on and get the information that they needed.  I called back, but the gentleman I was supposed to talk with wasn’t available, so I left a message and set out for lunch.

I had a lunch thing with my department today.  Normally for these things, I catch a ride with another couple women from my group.  But today, I drove myself.  As I was leaving the parking lot, I looked around for the Tahoe to see if maybe I could take down her plate numbers or something.  When I saw her car and started to drive up to it, I saw a gentleman with a clipboard taking notes.  I parked (a good ways away from her car) and asked if he was from my insurance company.  He said, no, he was from TWWTT’s company.  I introduced myself, said I was the one she was claiming had hit her, and that I hadn’t done it.  He asked if he could look at my car and take some photos and I said that would be fine.

He came over and took a look, took a handful of photographs, wrote some notes on his clipboard.  My agent called while the other gentleman was looking over my car, and he told me to expect a call from the claims department sometime later that day and that I should be sure to answer the phone when they called.  I said I would be sure to do so.

The agent from the other company was friendly and encouraging and said that, in his opinion, it really didn’t look like I had hit her.  He took my name and phone numbers in case he needed them, thanked me for letting him look at my car, and I went on my way to lunch.

When I arrived late to the restaurant, people asked what had made me so late.  So I told the situation to the group sitting around me.  A couple of them had already heard about it, but it was news to most of them.  And they were a wealth of information about what I should do.  And they were wonderfully encouraging.  It’s like having a bunch of helpful uncles.

When I got back to my desk, I called the local police to ask if I could get a copy of the report that had been written yesterday.  It turns out that there isn’t one.  I left a message for the officer who responded because he was out on the street at the time of my call and not available.  The woman who took the message suspected that because the claim was on private property and a week old, the officer probably gave TWWTT a form to fill out and file with her insurance.

After that, I contacted the security office at work and asked for a copy of the report that had been filed with that department.  That one I did get, complete with the name of the woman filing the complaint and photographs of the damage.  That’s right, I didn’t even know her name until I got the report from Security.  And can I say, there are some confusing discrepancies between reports – like when she says she saw me come into the parking lot and where she saw me park:  was it on the 6th or the 12th and was it beside her or just somewhere in the lot?  The whole thing is a mess.

I also went and spoke with the HR representative for my department.  She is a wonderfully pleasant woman and I told her everything that was happening.  She said that she would speak with Security, too, so she could get a good handle on what was happening and that I should be sure to keep her in the loop as things progress.  I mostly spoke with her to make sure that I’m not failing to do things like I should be with a situation this complicated and in a company this large.  And also so if things go badly and TWWTT gets nasty about it, I’ve already got someone who’s heard my side of the story.  I think that’s the first proactive thing I’ve done since this happened.  Everything else has been reactive, but this one, I’m stepping ahead of the game.

And since insurance is apparently one of the very few quickly moving things in the south, I got a call from the agent from the claims department from my insurance company.  He took a recorded statement about what had happened, with lots and lots of really wonderful questions.  Like, how big is the parking lot?  What color is your car?  How many blue cars are in the lot — more than one?  When were you informed of the incident?  What’s your understanding of the situation?  Were there any witnesses?

I feel good about my statement.  I answered all the questions clearly and honestly, trying to make it very clear where things were confusing to me and just didn’t make sense how she could be making this claim against me.  And at the very end, when he asked if there was anything else I’d like to add to the statement, I was able to explain where the paint on my car had come from.  He said, just from my statement, that they probably were going to deny her claim because it didn’t seem like she had any proof against me.  She can’t file a claim just based on her opinion.  It’s not the final call because someone still has to come out and look at my car and there are other things that have to happen, but he’s feeling good about it going in my favor.

Also, if TWWTT decides to argue against their findings and takes me to small claims court, my insurance will provide me with a lawyer, free of charge.

He did ask me to ask Security if there was security footage of the parking lot the day of the incident, so I contacted them again to ask if that was available.  Unfortunately, although there is a camera in that lot, it’s angled in such a way that it didn’t see either one of our cars that day.  When I called the claims group back to let them know that information, I missed the call from the woman from my insurance who wants to come out and look at my car and, amusingly, our mailbox.

Naturally, my cell phone had died by then and I don’t have the ability to call numbers that aren’t local from my work phone.  So, since Justin still has a cell phone with a Savannah area phone number, I called him and begged him to call her back.  He did and now I have an appointment with her tomorrow at 11:30.

It’s been a busy day.  But I’m feeling good about it.  I have a lot of support from the people in my department at work, all of them incredulous that TWWTT is trying to do this and several of them offering suggestions on what I should do next.  Justin, of course, is wonderfully supportive of me.  And all the insurance people I’ve spoken with today seem to agree that the claim just isn’t going to go through.  Why she didn’t just file a hit-and-run last week is absolutely beyond me.  But she can’t randomly accuse me of this and have the insurance just go along with it with no proof.

It was going okay.  I got up, got to work, started to settle into my morning.  And then a security officer called and asked if I could please go meet the officer standing by my car in the parking lot.  And when I got there, a woman was filing a complaint against me, accusing me of running into her Tahoe.

I didn’t do it, by the way.  Let’s get that one straight right there so at least you and I know the truth.  I never ran into her car.  I have not in my entire driving history done damage to another person’s vehicle.  My own car?   Yes, I’ve dented my own car a little bit.  And I’ve had someone back into me.  I did one time run into someone’s bumper, but it was made entirely of rubber so I bounced off with no damage done.  I have never damaged anyone else’s car.

So far as I know, the only evidence she has that connects me to the large dent on her bumper is that I have white paint on the passenger-side headlight of my car.  White paint that came from my mailbox when I ran into it back in October of 2008.

Yeah.  2008.  It was shortly after we’d moved into the townhouse and I was still learning how to park in our spot.  I’d had a rough day and was returning home in a bad mood and wasn’t paying much attention and slammed the front of my car into the mailbox pretty hard.  It scrapped across the headlight, leaving white paint, and I had to go put the mailbox back in place.

But the woman with the Tahoe made a statement to the security officer, and so I wrote down my statement, too.  At the time, I wasn’t even sure which paint spot she was talking about, so I wrote down on my statement that I ran into my mailbox twice, once in 2008 and again in 2010.  And then an officer from the county law enforcement showed up and took her statement again.  I was told to stay near my car, so I never spoke with the woman.  And the police officer came over and looked at my car briefly, but never really spoke with me before he left.

I stood by my car, waiting for someone to come back over and tell me what was going on, but everybody just took off and I stood there crying because I had no idea what was going on.  I didn’t run into her car!  I didn’t even know what damage had been done to her vehicle until after everybody had left and I very carefully, giving her car a wide berth, went around to look at what she was accusing me of having done.

I can see why she’s upset.  Someone left a basketball-sized dent in her back bumper.  But it wasn’t me.

I sat in my car and cried for a while before calling Justin back to let him know what had happened.  I’d called him while we were waiting for the police to show up and wanted to let him know what was going on.  He found the two dates here in my blog when I mentioned running into the mailbox, and told me to give that information to the officers.  So I made my way back into the building and snuck into a bathroom where I worked on trying to make my face less red and splotchy.  I am never going to be one of those girls who can cry and look fantastic doing it.  A lovely woman in the bathroom asked if I would be okay and I told her I was having a rough morning, but I’d be fine.

I got back to my desk and sent a message to security with the information from my website and asked if they could please add it to my statement about what happened to put white paint on my car.  And I asked them to please tell me more information about what it was that I’m being accused of having done to the woman’s Tahoe – what day and time she says it happened and what proof she’s offering that it was me other than the paint on my headlight.

So far, I haven’t heard anything back.

I have no idea what’s going on with the situation.  I assume it’s a good sign that I didn’t receive a ticket or anything from the officer.  But I’m not counting out the possibility that I’ll get a traffic court summons in the mail.  It’s extremely frustrating to me to not know what exactly to be expecting.  Did the police officer agree with the woman with the Tahoe about me hitting her car?  Would I know if he didn’t?

And do I have any pictures of my car that I can use to prove that the paint was pre-existing?  It’s been 19 months.  Do I have any pictures of the headlights of my car?

Is there any way at all that I can feel less powerless in this situation?

Around 1:30, I got a call back from the security officer who I emailed with my website evidence.  He was a little confused about my email and wanted to make sure that I understood that the security office wasn’t accusing me of anything.  The woman wanted to file a complaint, so they were letting her do that.  He wasn’t sure why she had involved the police—if she wanted to address insurance payments, then she could have worked with security to work out the situation.  And he was surprised that the police officer hadn’t spoken with me very much.  I assured him that the security officer who took my statement was pleasant and agreeable and that I just wanted to understand what was going on.  Was there more information I should know?  What was going to happen next?

To his knowledge, there is nothing else going to happen with this situation that would involve me.  Security isn’t interested in me because there’s no proof that I ran into the woman.  I said I didn’t do it.  That’s as far as they’re taking it.

The woman might file it with her insurance, but, again, since there’s no proof that I hit her vehicle, there’s no reason to expect that the situation will come back to me.

He also told me that the woman said that she was hit on the 6th.  That was last Thursday.  As in a week ago.  If she was going to involve the police, why did she wait until almost a week after the incident to call?  Does that confuse anyone other than me?

I was much less stressed out after talking with the gentleman from security.  At least I understood a little more about what was going on.

And then I was angry, something that I hadn’t been before, because I feel like the woman is looking for a scapegoat and grabbing the first one she can find.  She doesn’t care if she’s wrong about me or not, she’s just looking for someone to point to.  And it ticks me off that she can just point at me and accuse me of having done something and I had to get all worked up about how to defend myself and completely ruin my morning with worry and stress and frustration, instead of trying to think about how she was going to prove that I’d done what she was saying I had done.  She has nothing except paint and I bet it’s not even the same type of paint.  I bet the paint on my mailbox is a latex and car paint is definitely something else.

I’m not completely relaxed about it, though, because part of me still expects that I might get something in the mail, either regarding her insurance or going to traffic court or something.  Because that’s the way I am.  It’s not pessimism – it’s worst case scenario preparedness.  Right?  But I’m much less worried about this than I was yesterday.  And tomorrow I’ll probably be even less worried than I am today.  But yesterday, I was freaking out about it.

So, yeah.  That was my morning yesterday.  And most of my afternoon.  By the time I got off work, I’d had enough of dealing with people so I went home, put on work clothes, and completely took over the back yard.  I mowed the lawn.  I pulled out the weed whack and reclaimed the back tree-line.  I put down more mulch.  I moved everything that I could lift off the porch and swept it down.  I put everything away that was out of place and wiped down the table.  And when I was done, 2 hours later, the whole back yard looked amazing and I felt much better.  Justin came home halfway through and helped by working on tidying inside the house, so the inside looks great right now, too.  We had dinner on the back porch, enjoyed some time together, I watched an NCIS Los Angeles episode that made me cry, and I had some ice cream.

My evening turned out nice.  But my morning was awful.  And I’d really like to not have to do that again.

But yeah.  If you haven’t eaten anything for a couple days, my advice to you is not to start out by eating tuna noodle casserole.  It’s absolutely delicious, but your stomach will not thank you.  TRUST ME.

I’m back at work today, though.  I’ve been tempted more than once to go back home — when my alarm was ringing, when I was pulling out of the driveway, when I was walking all the way across the parking lot, when I was staring at my computer trying to figure out what I was doing, when I was sitting outside on lunch enjoying the beautiful weather . . . .  I think it’s a testament to my strong will that I’m still sitting here.

Not getting much work done.  But I’m here.

I think I had a point when I started, but it totally excapes me now.  I guess it was just to let you know that we’re starting to feel better.  And I should get back to work.

I actually have A LOT more to talk about filing, but I’m going to take it elsewhere.  I’ve got the website for my organizing business, so I’m going to post all these over on that site.  And I’ll link to it from here so you can know that I’ve written something, but I won’t post it here so you don’t have be completely excited totally bored overwhelmed by it over here.

I’m writing about it because I’m helping a client through this process right now and it’s helpful for me to write it down so I can work through the whole thing.  Paperwork can be really complicated, so it’s nice to be able to really focus on an aspect of it at a time, work through my thoughts, and get them down really clearly.  But I recognize that it’s not always terribly interesting to read.

I recognize it, but I don’t always understand it.   I mean, how can that not be interesting?

Anyway.  Welcome to the beginning of May, if you somehow missed that change-over.  Did April go by really quickly for anyone else?  And May looks like it’s going to be a very busy month for me.  We had plans to go to the Ren Faire in Atlanta last weekend, but stuck around the house so Justin could be sick at home instead of on the road.  He’s starting to do better, now that we’re on day 7 of him being sick.  Day 8?  MANY days. 

In other news:

• Tuesday is my sister-in-law’s birthday, so we’re trying to figure out how to celebrate that with her when she’s busy celebrating it with all of her college friends.  Plus, she needs to do laundry, so she’s got to come visit.  Mwha-ha-ha-ha!
• My parents are going to be within 6 driving-hours from our house all next week, so on Wednesday we’re going to go meet them half-way between for dinner. 
• Sometime in the next couple weeks my mother-in-law, step-father-in-law, and grandma-in-law are all coming to visit and pack up my sister-in-law for the summer break.  Apparently they may or may not be bringing their adorable puppy.    I don’t know when they’re arriving or for how long they’re staying.
• One of these weekends we’re hoping to go to Myrtle Beach to meet up with a couple friends.   I have no idea which weekend this is happening.
• Some local friends of ours are moving and they’re going to need help moving, I believe, on the 22nd, if we’re in town.
• And if there’s a free weekend somewhere in there, we’re still hoping to make it up to the Ren Faire.

Why does it all have to happen in May?!

Plus, of course, there’s the usual craziness with work.  We’re completing one or two projects each week this month.  Compare that to next month, when we’re planning to complete three in the entire month.  Who creates this schedule?!  Drunken baboons?

 But whatever.  Life is good!  It’s pouring down rain today and even that is good because it’s better than the 85% humidity and burning hot sunshine that we had yesterday.  And I remembered my umbrella.  And I got to talk with both of my parents last night and that was fantastic!  And there was a new Castle when we weren’t expecting one.

So life is busy, but life is good, and I’m feeling happy!  I think I’ll go for a walk. 

Yesterday at church, a reporter from the local newspaper came to the service and took photos so he could write an article about the “Shoes for Soles” project that we did.  It was “Barefoot Sunday” and everyone was encouraged to bring a pair of shoes to donate and go barefoot for the rest of the service.  The church collected over a thousand shoes to send out to people in Haiti and Rowanda.

The front of the newspaper today is 2/3 covered in a picture of the piano player’s foot.  And I’m standing in the background—blurry, but still vaguely recognizable as me.  The article that’s supposed to be on page 10 – 11 isn’t actually anywhere to be found in the paper, but maybe it’ll be out tomorrow.   I really don’t know what’s going on there.  But hey!  I’m on the cover of the newspaper!

I was invited to the 9:00 meeting that the director of my department holds on Mondays.  I was invited to this meeting once before and it turned out well, but it’s always a little scary being invited to a meeting with the “big dogs.”  This meeting turned out well for me again – I was given an award for my hard work on my projects lately.   There are three levels of awards:  bronze, silver, and gold.  Bronze awards come with a set of free tickets to a movie theatre in Savannah.  (Not terribly useful to us since it’s about an hour away from home.  I have four of those tickets in my purse right now.)  Silver awards come with a $50 voucher to the Wal-Mart close to the company grounds.  (And it really only works at that specific Wal-Mart.)  And Gold awards come with a $300 bonus check.

I was awarded a Silver award at the meeting.  $50 to spend at Wal-Mart!  It’s pretty exciting.

As a side-note, I received a Bronze award in January and again in February.  I was thinking I’d work on a trend and see if I could get one every month of the year.  (Who deserves a promotion?  I do!)    I didn’t get on in March, but I figure getting a Silver award makes up for both March and April.  Don’cha think?

On my way back to my desk from the meeting, I passed my lead.  (Or co-lead?  I’m not totally sure where he fits on the current chain-of-command, actually.)  He took a double-take and said, “Kylene, you’re shrinking!  Is that from Zumba?  I almost didn’t recognize you!”  It made me laugh, especially because he had to back-track and explain that he meant it in a good way and not at all badly . . . he’s very concerned about being proper to women in the workplace.  I have no idea what I’m doing differently from Friday when he saw me last, but made me feel really nice.

By the way, the scale on Saturday said I weighed 213.5 pounds, with shoes on.  That’s down 3 pounds from last week and about 19 pounds from my starting weight.  And I’m on day 29 of logging my food in a row!  If I can make it all the way through today and tomorrow (and really, why wouldn’t I?) then I can call and schedule my massage.  How awesome is that?!

But I’ve run up to the end of my lunch hour so I’ve got to go ahead and post this.  I hope you’re all having a fantastic Easter Monday!