Louisiana Snafus

 We are short staffed on this trip, and I’m annoyed about it. I have a lot of muscle stiffness, TMJ, and sciatica that’s making me miserable. But yesterday I took 600 mg of ibuprofen with an entire Red Bull and felt a lot better. Plus, the grocery store chain that we do here has an amazing selection, so it makes it more fun to “pretend shop” while I do inventory. It’s only Friday morning, and I believe I’ll be in overtime after only a few hours. Both today and tomorrow are likely to be 10 hour days, so that’s approximately 16-18 hours of overtime. I haven’t been keeping track though, and I’m not sure if my guess is guessing high or guessing low. 

One of my coworkers on the Dallas crew came back from medical leave after having cancer, and she has announced that she’s cancer free. This was good news. When she showed up to work the first day of the trip, she had one of these. It’s a kneeling pad on wheels from Temu. I was instantly jealous. I actually think I might get one. I have a kneeling pad, but it doesn’t have wheels. Kevin wears knee pads, but I hate wearing them for sensory reasons. As I was counting the school supplies section, I wondered to myself, did anyone come across that item on Temu and think, who would buy this?  Under what circumstances would one need to roll around on their knees?  But we do!  It comes in handy if you do inventory in stores! 

My company gives meal allowance money for out of town trips.  Most of the time, the boss gives us a cash envelope on the first day of the trip, but sometimes he doesn’t and it’s just added to the next check. I asked the boss if we would get it in cash this time, and he said “he had to ask” but it seemed promising, and then I think he just didn’t feel like going to the bank for it. Or he didn’t want to ask. Because of this, I took all the cash out of my 100 envelope challenge and brought it with me. That’s a set back. But since my next paycheck will be enormous, I can start over with that. Plus, I’m able to bum off of my husband. 

Today is likely to be an easier day, because our Austin crew has arrived. We’ll have a lot more people today. We might get back to the motel earlier, and I may do some coin laundry since this is such a long trip. 

Perspective

 This evening, I had a nice thought. 

When I look back on all of my memories from my entire life, it totals approximately 40 years. Now that I’m middle aged, I get to do approximately that same amount of time, 40 years, all over again. But this time, with wisdom. 

Tidbits

I have been watching all the latest documentaries about the Idaho murders. There have been quite a few of them now that the killer took a plea deal. It’s interesting to me how differently all four of the families tend to feel about the case. It seems like one family wants him to have the death penalty, one doesn’t, one doesn’t care as long as he’s away from society, and one isn’t really interviewed much. I could be wrong. I disagree that he purposely committed “femicide” obviously, because one of the victims is male. Some people might say something like, it’s still femicide because the male victim was the boyfriend of one of them, but I am just not buying it. He’s a serial killer, plain and simple. He has probably killed before. 

One of the moms (the one that I said isn’t interviewed much) was actually interviewed briefly, and she said she forgives the killer because she found Jesus. 20 years ago, that may have been inspirational, but now that I’m older I realize that even Jesus requires repentance. Brian Kohberger hasn’t repented. He only pled guilty to save himself. Now I just think that mom should not have been interviewed. 

Right after the murders happened and before he was caught, I wondered out loud, in front of my mother, “I wonder if it was a criminology student trying to get away with murder as part of their thesis.”  I didn’t realize how right on I was in my prediction. My mom often brings that up now, and I wish I hadn’t said it in front of her. She calls it a joke. (“Remember the joke you made about how it’s probably a criminology student?” she’ll say). I tried to explain that it was more of an intrusive thought than a joke and she started scoffing at me for being aware of mental health terminology. 

At work, for the time being, we are still a crew of five. Me, my husband, the boss, his wife, and their nephew. The boss’s wife ranted to me today about the fact that her nephew isn’t going to Louisiana with us and how pissed people are about this. He said he was “going on vacation” but she told me that actually his wife isn’t letting him go and doesn’t believe it’s really a work trip. She told me that his wife is really jealous. I said, “maybe he cheated on her before.”  She said, “No he didn’t!  Her first husband did and she hasn’t gotten over it!” 

She proceeded to tell me that his wife is jealous of ME and the women on the crews in the other cities. I said, “ME?!?!  Tell her she has nothing to worry about.”  

Bosses wife said, “Yup, you’re married.” 

I said, “Even if I wasn’t. Trust me she has nothing to worry about.”  

Then I asked, “Is she jealous of you?” 

She replied, “Well no because I’m his aunt.” 

Oh yeah, I guess that makes sense. I said it again. “He must have cheated in the past.” And she insisted, no no, not her nephew, that woman is just paranoid!  

Siiiigh. I told Kevin about it all the way home, and we had good laughs. 

We are going to get a lot of hours and most likely overtime in Louisiana this week and next week.  I still sometimes can’t believe that I have been married to Kevin for four months, started dating him two years ago, and that I’m still working at the company where I met him. I also cannot believe that no one is demanding I give them my back up plan for in case “he leaves you and you get fired all at once”. I was raised to constantly think this way. Does no one ask me this because I’m older now or because they already know I’m just going to take off and do the merchandising apps until I figure something else out?  Or maybe it’s because I know from experience that the advice they’d give anyway is generally bad advice and I didn’t know that when I was younger?  Or maybe it’s because the majority of all my old abusive and domineering family members are senile and locked away in nursing homes. Perhaps some of them died and I wasn’t told. I don’t know, but it’s sure nice to be married and not have all these women over my head saying “What are you going to do if he dies or leaves you?”  That gets old. 

Weekend Highlights

 When we got paid on Saturday, I brought my student loan balance to $17K even. The balance was $17,222.46, and I made a payment of $222.46. When the pandemic happened and interest rates were frozen for almost three years, it was at $20K even. I started making payments to decrease the balance when interest resumed 22 months ago. I only cared to make enough payments so that the balance would decrease. Now that my car is paid off, I want to do more. I’m extremely lucky. I still browse the subreddits for student loans, and it seems like so many people are completely screwed over for life. They make significant payments each month, and the balances increase. 

I’m also saving money into a retirement account on Robinhood and doing the 100 envelope challenge. I have been on Robinhood for years, but now can add more to it. The envelope challenge booklet was sitting empty in my car (tucked into the back passenger seat pocket) but now has some smaller amounts filled. 

I made plans to take my husband and daughter to the St. Francis Wolf Sanctuary next month. My daughter moves into the dorm on 8/15, and this will be our last major outing before she goes. I’m looking forward to seeing the wolves. You can also camp there, but my husband isn’t a camping fan. 

We are about to leave for Louisiana for about 8 days. We were off today, and I finished making everything from the last fabric shopping hauls into squares. I also finished laundry and packed. We didn’t want to go shopping due to being out of town next week, so we just went out to eat. 

Funny News

The latest viral sensation- the couple who ducked and hid their faces after being exposed on the big screen at a Coldplay concert- is hilarious to me. If you aren’t familiar with it, here it is.  I’ve been to some televised things before, and I’ve seen a camera person walking around getting audience footage. I saw one person put their hands up as if to say “no” and the camera man respected it and didn’t take their picture. This cameraman person, however, was like: 

No one would have noticed if they didn’t make it so super obvious. Also no one would care if he wasn’t a billionaire. 

Two years ago, I may have acted similarly to being caught in a romantic embrace on a camera like that. Not because I was being unfaithful to anyone, but because I had spend my entire life with a lot of people who always had a problem with the idea of me in any relationship. HOWEVER I would not have acted THAT ashamed. I probably would have just pulled away and that’s it. I would not have done all the humiliation ducking and face covering. That made it extra obvious that they were in an affair. If it had just been me and someone, two years ago, before I really came to realize that I’d reached the age where no one really wants to tell me what to do anymore, I probably would have pulled away, turned red. And applaud embarrassingly. 

Then the guy issued a statement where he blamed the band! 

 

My Birthday!!

About a week ago, Kevin was talking about how I “saved him from his townhouse”. 

If you don’t know the story, to make a long story short, he had inherited a townhouse from his grandmother. It was the second from the right in a row or five in a complex full of townhomes. The building had a bad foundation, and Kevin was dealing with a bad HOA as well. 

In 2023, I took a real estate class for fun. Almost as soon as Kevin allowed me to see the damage in his house, I asked him why he didn’t call an investor. He said “Because obviously they wouldn’t want this place.”  

Feeling unsure of that, I called an investor and described the situation without giving the actual address.   Once this investor convinced me to get Kevin to call him, I told Kevin what I did, fully expecting him to be mad at me for “overstepping.”  (I mean, I was overstepping, but I only called for my own curiosity and wasn’t going to tell Kevin until this dude convinced he wanted the townhouse and could deal with the HOA.) 

At the end of that week, Kevin met the investor, and the investor paid him for the townhouse about the same amount Kevin would have paid someone to take it off his hands. Since then, Kevin has said that “I saved him.” We had just become “official” about 2-3 month before. We then moved into the guest house on his parent’s property, where we still are to this day. 

I got this awful feeling that if god forbid something happened to Kevin and I was in severe grief talking about how “he always said I saved him” that others might just think that’s BS. Or, they might think that I just wish a man had said that about me. So I asked Kevin to write it all down, in his own handwriting, and sign his name. I said “don’t type it out, because that’s not proof.”  

I don’t know why I had that intrusive thought about some hypothetical future scenario in which I’m grieving my husband and no one around me believes what I’m saying he always told me. That was 1-2 weeks ago, and we forgot about it. Then I woke up on my birthday, and this note was with my card. I also got a $100 gift card, and we took my daughter to eat after work. 

Today I turn 47. Every year since I turned 36, I’ve googled on my birthday what celebrities died at the age I’m turning. This is the first time in 11 years that I didn’t do that. I knew offhand that Judy Garland did. I wasn’t interested in the rest. Maybe that anxiety is going away. 

 

Regular Week

 

I’m so glad to be back into a regular, local work schedule this week. We had a few days off in which I had no motivation at all. I took my daughter to get her first tattoo, and while she did describe it to me beforehand, I wasn’t expecting it to be as big as it was. First tattoos are painful. I only have a teeny weeny one on my hand, and even that hurt. She’s only 18, and I was 38 when I got mine. It was a little intense. She was squeezing my hand and almost breaking my fingers. I haven’t really seen her in pain since she was little and received her vaccines. 

But at lease that’s over, and she’s feeling a lot better. 

It did drain me though. I guess I could have spent the rest of my days off turning my big 25 cent day haul from a couple weeks ago into 6 inch squares, but there was no motivation to do even that. All I did was rot in bed and doom scroll. I constantly tried to raise my own awareness about why this tragedy in central Texas happened, and I became too aware. Sade Perkins was living in my head rent free until I saw a comment saying, “This is a psy op, and she’s a fed!”  I wondered what a psy op was and came across this video explanation. He explains what it is and then describes literally everything the mass media and social media do all day every day. Some in those comments were like, “is this video a psy op?”  If you go around repeating the things this guy says, imo that’s a great way to end up in a padded room. 

Luckily by the time I gave it up, it was time to go to work. 

One of the reasons why I like my job is because it’s constant movement, all numbers, all facts, and channels all this pent up energy out of me.