Recently...

I have become a busy monkey. I got a graveyard shift job at a huge corporation doing manual labor. I am doing internship at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. I am taking microeconomics for the second time and, because of my professor, understand it.
Here's the interesting thing;
When I get out of work it is usually 5:30 in the AM. The soonest a bus comes anywhere near me is 6:20 AM. That's a long time. Once, as a lark, I decided to bike it home. I found a fairly flat route and have a couple of hills in my favor and one slightly steep one that hates me.
I've been doing it ever since.
It's early, very little traffic and I get to watch the sun rise as I pedal my way home. When do I get home, you ask?
About 6:30 AM.
I checked Google Map and it is 8.8 miles to get home in time to see my children get on the bus and then hit the sack because my bike ride has left me wiped enough to want to go to bed.
Kind of a win/win situation.
So, to wrap it up; Kinda busy, riding my bike more and in a couple of months...graduated.
Have a great day!

Time To Bring The Pain!

So, last week I bent over and felt a twinge in my back. About 17 years ago I did a splat on the ice and wrecked my back. Since then I had only thrown it out twice. Until last week.
Then it settled in along with a new job and stress over that and financial aid giving me grief again and stress over that.
Then the pain settled in.
Last night it was so bad that I got no sleep and this morning I got a trip to the ER. Seems I have Sciatica. And I got it bad. So, now I have Norco, Flexeril and Motrin to keep me company while I am flat on my back for the next three days or so. Yeah, this will look good to my new boss. I informed them I was out for the rest of the week. We'll see how that goes.
Now, for the funny.
At the hospital they made me change into a gown. I was allowed to keep my underwear  on. My underwear of choice is boxer briefs. Well, the only comfortable position I could get in was with my left leg in a flexed position to my side and my right leg bent upward. Martha was watching the doctor explain everything to me and wondered why he wasn't able to maintain eye contact with me. She followed his line of sight and saw that it was resting firmly on my crotch. Seems the boxer briefs had shifted and my cajones were on display to the world. I was too out of it realize it or care, but the doctor got a distracting eyeful.
Martha had to restrain herself from laughing until he left the room.
So, my lovely Martha  brought me my laptop and put me to bed.
I will be here for a while.
Prayers are encouraged and much appreciated.

WORK; DAY ONE

I got there a little early. Martha took me because Kalamazoo isn't bright enough to have bus services on Sunday. I met my boss and he was very nice. Everyone was very nice, actually. I was tired and cranky by the end of my shift, but I think it will be alright. Luckily I had the next two days off. The bad part would be that I did something to my back the week before and it's still quite sore. I think it will help that I will be working in the freezers from now on. The cold air will help. I did buy some capsaicin cream for the pain so we'll see what that does.

End and Beginning

So, two years and seven months ago I was dragged into a little meeting room and told that my position in the company had been eliminated. This didn't bother me. I told them I would be happy to take a pay cut and do a lower position.
Uh-uh.
They didn't work that way.
They did give me my full unemployment benefits without a fuss so, I decided to go back to school. But, not just school for any old degree. No, I went for the most popular degree in existence.
Business.
College is really no more than going into debt so you can get a piece of paper that will get you a better job to pay off all that debt you have.
This Summer I will attend microeconomics and have my internship.
Then I will be done.
I am thankful for college for one reason;
It introduced me to ceramics. Without college I might never have know and that would have sucked. Sort of like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable going through his life without knowing he had super powers. You know I've never broken a bone in my life. Hmmmmm.
Anyway, school will soon be over.
I have also found gainful employment, which is nice after two years and seven months.
June 25th I will be fifty years old.
I sure don't feel fifty.
A few years back I chronicled one year with daily entries of my forty-five year of existence.
It seems like forever ago I wrote that.
Now I think it's time to do it again.
Let's see if I can manage to do it without screwing up the days again.

Funny...

I go to this church called Freedom Church. It is extremely music-centric and fun. The pastor, Jeremy, always has a great, positive message. It is held in a cafeteria in a school in Portage. Anyway, I needed to use the restroom and on my way back a series of posters made by elementary school students caught my eye. One in particular was for the state of Maryland. It was made of boxes of pictures with a description under each box. The first had these stick figures being attacked by something undecipherable, but the caption clarified it with this;
"Geography is a deadly disease carried by mosquitos."
Um, what?
I literally almost fell on the floor laughing.
The next box had a guy standing in it in what appeared to be a field or something. Under it;
"Come to Maryland where you don;t have to vote."
Next time I head to church, I'm bringing my camera.
This makes me smile if I just think of it.

Kung Fu...I Think.

SO, in the days when I was young, back in Boy Scouts there was no video games, internet, Hell, cable TV was just starting. Anyway, you would watch television at home and then talk about it when you saw your friends.
So, I'm pretty sure this was an episode of Kung Fu that this guy takes these bronze coins and imbeds them in a huge wooden idol. It was pretty cool if you were tweleve.
That weekend we went camping and we had all completed something that got us each a huge, bronze coin as a medal. What for? I have no recollection, but you know what happened all weekend?
That's right, we chucked those things at trees figuring we could do what we saw on the TV.
While I'm pretty sure that no one actually managed to do, I do know that about half of us came home with no bronze coin. Those things flew into the woods and were never heard from again.

Have I mentioned...

...that I am still unemployed? I got off to the bus stop this morning to what I thought was an interview for a management position in retail. When I got there it was a cattle call with like ten people there. To add insult to injury it was for part time. Wasted three bucks worth of bus tokens for the round trip and the bus took forever.
I had brought my laptop so I could stop by the cable access station to see if we could figure out why my DVDs won't play.
Yeah, nobody there. Just the bigwigs and they were busy. Also, now you have to ask for the key to the bathroom. I assume it's some sort of hobo problem. I did make a copy of the recent episode of The BAsement of BAron Morbid and left a blank disc to see if their equipment would fare any better. I will have to try a later time to see the tech guys.
I recently had a dream where I am working is some restaurant. Of course, that never goes well because I have no idea what I'm doing and the dream state is mocking me the entire time. This last one, though, it didn't mock me all that much, but there was a clear moment where I was standing in this kitchen and all I wanted to do was go home.
I have been either home or school full time since October of 2009. I'm  starting to wonder if I am unemployable at this point.
Kind of a waiting game at this point.