“It worked for me.”

I got a comment last night regarding my posts about seeking therapy. This comment said that therapy worked for them, and just because I had bad experiences doesn’t mean that all therapy is bad. Oh absolutely!  I just want to make it clear that when I am talking about my own experiences in my own space, I’m talking about my life only. I learned a long time ago that different things are good for different people. It would be a pretty boring place if we were all the same. My only intent by sharing my experience is to simply share my experience. I am not lobbying to outlaw therapy by any means. If something helps you personally, and that thing isn’t illegal, then keep doing it!  

I thought that was assumed!  

This person also said that the therapists probably told me “an inconvenient truth” and I didn’t like it. If that is true, then I would like to know what inconvenient truth?  Perhaps they meant that I should not have flirted with my supervisor in 2023 and subsequently married him. Yes I know, in general, that’s looked down on. But it’s not like this was some corporate job, and it’s not like he was some politician. It was an inventory service for Christ sake!  The latest person they hired had face tattoos!  There are several other people in that company that got their significant others jobs there.  And even if it was still wrong to do what I did three years ago?  What am I going to do about it now?  Leave my husband?  Try and make me?  You can’t, because the latest narrative that therapists are trying to push is that they don’t make people do things they don’t want to do. This latest narrative is in response to what some are calling “the trend” for adult children to go no contact with parents. Estranged parents are blaming therapists, and therapists all of a sudden are all about not telling people what they should do. 

What they actually do instead, is they ask you repeated questions about your bad choice and if you still won’t comply, they “hold you accountable”. Basically, it’s telling you what to do with extra steps. One person called it “motivational interviewing.”  The estranged parents who go online and start smear campaigns against their own sons and daughters are telling on themselves and only make people side with their kids more. But do I think they’re right about the therapists telling their kids what to do?  Absolutely. Therefore, it wouldn’t make sense to try and tell me my marriage is wrong. If you don’t  tell people to cut off their parents then you can’t tell anyone to leave their spouse.

I’m not actually sure that’s what she meant though. It’s possible that she was just someone who felt undermined because someone said what worked for her didn’t work for me. That can be sort of threatening when you haven’t fully accepted the fact that people are very diverse. We should all be leaning into the things that work for us and make us healthier and happier. Sometimes, if I hate apples and you say, “I love apples!” I might feel like that is a dig against me. But it isn’t. It’s about apples, not the person. Hope this helps. 

After reading this comment, I went to the fitness center and did ten minutes on the elliptical machine. This time, my back didn’t go out!  Also it felt great!  The elliptical is definitely one way to get the anxiety out. 

Old Friend

 Well Mary, your post about homeless people asking you for change reminded me of an old memory that was too long for a comment. So here’s a post about it. 

This happened more than 20 years ago, because I know it was before my daughter was born. I was about to walk into Einstein bagels on Montrose Blvd in Houston. I had a $10gift card. A homeless woman asked me if I had any change. I said no and then literally said, “I have no money” which for me at the time, meant, I’m not carrying cash and I was also using a gift card. Back then, stuff was a lot cheaper and I didn’t know that you didn’t have to spend the whole gift card in one trip to get the full value. So I got two bagels and a bunch of snacks. This is also how you know this was an extremely long time ago. All that for $10!  

As I was walking out with my bag, this same woman started accosting me  “yeah right! You have no money but you got all of that!”  I kind of felt bad for her so I just gave her one of the two toasted bagels.  Then I remembered I had some loose change in my cup holder  I offered it to her, and she said no, and she was very happy with the bagel  

Several months later I saw her again at the nearby Walgreens.  She approached me and asked if I had any change.  I said no, but asked her what she needed. I can’t remember what else she said but she wanted rubbing alcohol to clean her skin.   We chatted a while and she was cool.  

The third time I saw her was even more months later.  This time, it was pouring rain and it was outside of Walgreens again.  I said, “oh hey!  I have not seen you for a while!”  I could tell she didn’t recognize me, but still wanted to use the fact that I remembered her to ask for something.  She told me, “Well I got my own place now”.  I congratulated her and asked where.  She told me.  It was about 3-4 miles away and due to the rain that was just starting, she asked if she could have a ride back  

In the car, she explained that she was able to get the apartment due to an organization in Houston that helped people with HIV/AIDS.  When I dropped her off, I didn’t go in, but I did wait in my car until she walked in.  She had three or four plants on her balcony.

That was the last time I saw her.  When I told my mother about it, my mother went and got her Clorox wipes and made me wipe down the passenger seat of my car.  She still had the 1980’s misconceptions about HIV-AIDS 

Chartreuse Notebooks 📒 📒 📒

 I just got to work for my Sunday night 8pm until Monday morning 8 am shift, and I brought my three chartreuse notebooks to write in. I have over a dozen more. Mostly chartreuse, but some pink and some orange. 

This is my method for books/writing projects that are entirely in your head, but you are overwhelmed with the idea of getting them onto paper. 

One notebook like this per project. 

One sentence at a time. 

Skip five or six lines between sentences. 

Later on, when you think of something that goes somewhere you’ve already written about, jot it in the 5-6 lines between the sentences it goes between. 

If there still isn’t room, add a sticky note. 

Once full or almost full, start a new notebook with 5-6 more lines between all sentences (even the ones you jotted down later). 

Rinse and repeat until project is finished. 

First, a picture of my two babies here in Austin. 

Secondly, I found an app called rebound for trauma therapy. I very begrudgingly agreed to a “free 15 minute session” (which is basically interviewing you so they can decide if they want to help you).  The lady on the other line was helpful and kind- I do not think she was a therapist though. I think she was a sales rep or maybe some kind of medical assistant therapy version. She explained that they do a method called “Pervasive Exposure” therapy. She explained it. I explained my ACES situation briefly and she gave the disclaimer that I think they all have to make, but don’t actually implement- that it doesn’t matter what you’ve been through or haven’t been through etc. I then asked about some elements of my story potentially not being believable to a therapist. She explained that the therapy method doesn’t depend on anyone believing you, it just goes through your reactions while recounting the memories and easing those up. 

Hmm I see. Then I did what they all say not to do and went to ChatGPT and told it to guide me through PE therapy. I’m going to have to think extremely hard about actually going to someone. They say not to use ChatGPT as a therapist, because they’ll lose income if everyone did so. But the fact that it’s not actually human means it literally can’t believe or disbelieve me. It has to automatically think that I can have this type of therapy if I ask for it. It’s not thinking that my trauma isn’t valid. A human therapist might. Just saying. 

 

I got off at work at 8:00 am and walked with Kevin a little in the park this morning. I lowered my step goal to 5500 and hope to achieve that each day this week. 

Coworkers With Audacity

 The home I work in has three other coworkers besides me. One is the supervisor, and the other two are older and have been here many years. The supervisor is older too, but hasn’t been here long. I just want to get this off my chest- I was always raised to not ever sleep on the job. That should be common sense, right?  Not only that, but I was raised that if I’m on the clock I should “always be doing something”, even if it’s dusting the dust. These coworkers are in their late 60’s and early 70’s and were not raised the same way. That’s weird to me, because I thought older people had more of a work ethic than younger people. 

They were getting a lot of overtime before I started, and so far, neither of the non-supervisor ladies have held it against me personally. I’m cognizant that that can change at any time. The supervisor works Monday through Friday 8-4 and the other two ladies alternate the 4- midnight shift and the weekends and my overnights off. I have three overnights off and work two 12 hour shifts and two 8 hour shifts per week. 

Between 9:00 pm and 6:00 am, we are required to log hourly bed checks on the desktop computer in the house. The computer records your time stamp, so you can’t cheat. You just click on each resident’s name and specify if they’re awake, asleep, on leave, or hospitalized. Bed checks for people who sleep well and know how to go to the bathroom take no more than a minute or two. You just look in on them lol. It’s not that serious. You have to be awake though!  That’s what the two coworkers hate. They literally want to sleep on the clock, even on the overtime clock. No, ma'am. I cannot believe their audacity honestly. I want to say something out loud but don’t, because I feel like the minute I do, they’ll start blaming me personally for cutting their hours. One of them, who the supervisor called “the whiniest person she’s ever met” complains because she has a mortgage to pay. I would say I’m sorry about that, but I’m not. People her age have hammered it into me that if I’m not making enough money, I need to figure it tf out with a second job or move onto something else. Younger me would have felt responsible for her mortgage, even though I may not ever be a homeowner. She also said that looking in on the resident ladies hourly every night “is abuse” and I didn’t appreciate that. It’s not abuse. It may be neglect if you’re sleeping by on the job and god forbid something happens. 

This particular coworker wrote a long and scathing email to the boss of the boss of the boss. Like three or four people up. She thought they’d be on her side, but my supervisor said, they aren’t. In fact, it caused her a lot more problems. The higher ups don’t like her now. Oops. I told my supervisor that she said the nightly bed checks were abuse. Supervisor gave me a look and said “Well it’s going to be ‘abuse’ when she loses her job.”  

The other coworker refuses to take the resident ladies out in outings in the van. We are supposed to. Like I mentioned, there is a whole federal law now that says institutionalized disabled people need to be integrated into the community. This coworker said, “Once I start doing that, they’re going to expect me to do it all the time.”  Really, she’s been expected to do it since 2014. I told drunk text boss. If there’s a free concert they want to go to then just schedule me on the 4-12 shift and I’ll take them. Most of their outings would happen in the morning, but the occasional “free concert” is what DTBoss was worried about them missing. It takes getting used to driving a big ass van, but I did it a couple of times when I stayed after 8:00 am and took some of them on doctor appointments. 

I have been through a ton on jobs over the years, and I can’t get over the things they complain about. The one DTboss called whiny complains about the hourly bed checks every time I see her. She says she refuses to do them and goes to bed in the staff room. She said, “What are they going to do, write me up? Fire me?”  I didn’t say this out loud but… yeah. They probably will. She then said the only reason all of this was happening was because mercury was in retrograde.  🥴

I think back to this work readiness class I took in high school, taught by my sophomore English teacher.  He would have keeled over from a heart attack if he heard their lack of work ethic.  

I’m writing this out now, because I’m going in tonight at 8:00 pm and the whiner/ mercury retrograde/ bed checks are abuse lady will be there and I’m scared today will be the day she starts blaming me for all this.  I’m REALLY grateful she hasnt!  I should just hang on to that 

Painted Rock Snake

The park two blocks away has a “snake” of painted rocks. Anna made me this one when she was about 8. This morning, I took it there and left it at the end of the snake. The step goal set on my phone is at 7,500 steps. I have not come close to meeting that goal the entire month I’ve lived in Austin. It’s because of the night shift and my efforts to get a changed sleep schedule. So I’ve been laying around a lot. But I think I have that figured out by now, so it’s time to start exercising again. 

 

Photo Dump and Austin Reflections

I was just thinking today, I’m so glad I work at this group home. I deserve to have an easy job with people that are easy to care for and easy to work with. I am grateful that my husband told me that he’d rent me an apartment and pay for me to go to Austin alone for now if I got a job. If he hadn’t said that, I would have hung up on these people when they said what the pay was. But with 5-7 hours of overtime per week, the paychecks are ok. Plus I have the time, energy, mental health and opportunity to do a lot of side jobs. 

Here are some recent photos from my phone:

I asked ChatGPT to make my facebook profile have red hair and it thought that would violate nudity. Lol. Ai ain’t that smart. Also, how many of you have written kinky stories on ChatGPT only to have it scold you?  

It does!

Facebook thought I knew this person. I don’t. You must be a bad mother if you make your statement on your profile picture “Save Motherhood, Abolish Family Court.”  Lol what IS her story?  What on earth did she do to her kids?

This is my mom as a baby with her 14 year old sister Diane. Aunt Diane and I were very close. She passed away in 2012. 

I took this selfie with Jordan, and Ai cleaned it up to look like I was in bed with perfect eyebrows and makeup. 

My sewing machine is doing this. I can’t get the tension right to save my life. 

Mitchell will only play bite the back of my wrist. And only every other time I show it to him. If he bit me the last time I showed him the back of my wrist he won’t do it this time. Every other time!  

 

Helping Myself

Edited to add- I just realized that the post I linked below did talk about the therapist that didn’t believe me.  I have been wanting to write this out in order to make sense of things and start setting my own goals regarding healing from “anxiety” and “C-PTSD”. I’m putting those in quotes because I’m not sure if the actual diagnoses apply. Back in May, I made this post detailing what I’ve gone through while trying to seek therapy. Since then, I have tried again.  There was one lady that I saw for one “free 15 minutes session” and one actual hour long session. She didn’t believe my story. At least twice, she asked me if I was sure what I was saying happened and not something else. One of these had to do with what year. She asked if I was sure something that happened in 2013-2014 wasn’t “during the pandemic.”  I didn’t appreciate that at all. 

The next lady had a free 15 minute session and three hour long sessions with me. She was great until the middle of the third session, when she got this Jekyll and Hyde personality switch and started basically telling me to get over it and stop living in the past. That’s a very dumb thing for a therapist to say, because we can get over it and stop living in the past for free. We don’t need a therapist to help us do that. When I called her out on this personality switch mid-session, she said it never happened. That was even more of a punch in the face. Some people online said “report her”. I can’t if she’s saying it never happened. The session wasn’t being recorded. Whomever you’d report this to would believe her over me. 

This last lady, the Jekyll and Hyde lady, also seemed to take away my diagnosis of c-ptsd (“complex” or “chronic” post traumatic stress disorder, depending on who you ask, but it all starts with C so it’s ok). 🙄 Her reasoning was based on the ACES test. ACES is a questionnaire you fill out answering which adverse childhood experiences you’ve had. It helps clinicians diagnose you with c-ptsd, but since it’s become more and more clear that it’s very incomplete and very unfair, a lot of them are backpeddling now saying “it’s just a tool” and all sorts of vague shit about what the ACES really is. They’ll say “it doesn’t matter” which of the adverse childhood experiences you’ve experienced or not, but it does matter enough for that to be the very first thing they give you. I actually spoke with a young man online who claimed to be a survivor of the Stoneman-Douglass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, who was told some BS because he couldn’t check any boxes on the ACES test. Perhaps surviving a school shooting should be on there, I don’t know!  Also missing from ACES is bullying and medical trauma. It’s probably because the woman who developed it was a healthy bully. 

Some of the ACES questions are asked in such a way that I am not sure if I can answer them with a yes or a no. One of these questions is, “Did you witness your mother being abused by your father?”  Yes and no. My mother treated my father horribly, and he often reacted. A therapist wouldn’t recognize that as valid, though. It would specifically have to be the father abusing the mother one way.  

Another question I’m not sure I can answer yes or no to is “Did you grow up in a home with a parent with mental illness?”  My mother never went to a psychiatrist or a therapist, so she never got a diagnosis. She does, however, claim to have had postpartum depression for 15 years. As I’ve said before, this would only make sense to me if she kept having children but I was an only child. And does postpartum even count in what they’re describing there?  As noted in the latest news story these days, postpartum is seen as a very valid excuse/reason for most if not all things. It seems to be used whenever women murder their kids. So am I justified in my trauma, or am I just a big uneducated meanie when it comes to postpartum?  

The other questions are a definite no for me. Did your parents get divorced? No. Were they poor? No. Were they drug addicts? No. Were they ever incarcerated? No. Then, abuse questions come up. Were you physically abused? Were you emotionally abused?  Were you sexually abused?  I was physically assaulted by my aunt and two older cousins in my teen years. My mother often did as well, but a therapist might shrug it off as discipline, especially since she was not a single mother. Emotional abuse is written off by therapists as “You just took stuff wrong”. Especially since I could not answer positively to any of the four first questions about divorce, incarceration etc. 

So when it comes to ACES, maybe I scored high and maybe I scored zero. The last therapist I saw said I didn’t have c-ptsd, even though I was diagnosed with it in 2025. 

Whether or not I am someone who deserves to say they have something validating like c-ptsd, I still have the symptoms. You might think I’m just a bitch who isn’t grateful she got to grow up with two parents and doesn’t understand postpartum, and that’s fine, but I still suffer from almost all symptoms of c-ptsd. In addition to having what I consider (but you may not) to be a difficult childhood, I then grew up to take on very hard jobs for very low pay, working with children at risk and elderly and disabled adults. I believe this compounded my “c-ptsd”. I was forced to absorb the trauma of multiple children and adults. Again I’m putting my it in quotes because no one can agree on whether I “have” it. 

This puts me in a situation where I have to come up with a game plan to get better, and no one is going to help me do it. I have to do it myself. Being in such a healthy environment in Austin now is a great foundation for beginning to do this. I live in a great place, have a great job, enough money, and my physical health. The only downside is that my husband isn’t here full time yet but he will be. Having a supportive partner is also an enormous plus when it comes to healing. It’s better than being single, but being single is better than having a shitty partner. 

I have him to lean on, and my mother is 3-4 hours away now. I have minimal contact with her. I have a supportive friend or two, and my daughter is doing great. I really can’t complain. Therefore, I need to start working on goals to feel better. I have the perfect stage to do so. 

Continuing to take a weight loss supplement so I’m not always hungry, and exercising every day is a start to physically feeling better. I get muscle symptoms in my arms and legs. It feels like spaghetti muscles when it gets really bad, and exercise helps work this out. Doctors will often ask if this feels like “pins and needles.”  I really don’t know about that description. It’s not how I would think “pins and needles” would feel, but I can see how someone else would describe it that way?  Something I can do every day is really make myself go out to the fitness center in my complex or the park two blocks away. I also need to keep Mitchell away from my earbuds, because I can’t exercise without them and he loves them!  Since Mitchell came into my life, I’ve probably been through 20 pairs!

The next way to channel my anxiety is through my creativity. I have all of my 6 inch squares sorted into this shelving unit inside our massive closet in this apartment. I’m still working on an Etsy shop with quilts and wreaths. I also need to hit up Dollar Tree for more wreath frames. My sewing machine is set up on my desk. 

I also have a spiral notebook for each writing project in my head. They are all chartreuse colored and college rule and were $1.47 right now during back to school days. I write a line and then skip about six lines. Then I go back through them and jot things down in the six empty lines that go between the thing above it and the thing below it. When that gets to be full, I start another notebook with five or six more lines between each thing that is now in the old one. The Child Advocate is now on its second spiral and I also have one for another book in my head, and my missing people who may be still alive writing advocacy project. 

If I can just propose each day to do something for exercise and creativity, I will likely feel at least 20% better by the first cool front. 

Physical things I can do besides take gabapentin (I can take it sometimes but not always)- bathe with bath bombs for athletes. These bombs are expensive, but they do wonders for the spaghetti leg/not really pins and needles feeling. Also if I find myself paralyzed in bed, just simply going out to my car to organize something or throw away a piece of trash will help the paralyzed panic feeling. 

Cuddling with my cats also helps. Mitchell isn’t a big cuddler, but Jordan is starting to be. Alex is still with my husband in Hempstead and will go live with my daughter in San Marcos. (She asked for him). He used to be an instant therapy cat when he was younger but is now retired. Jordan can cuddle somewhat before he starts play biting. 

If I can think of anything else, I will edit this and put them here. Ironically, this is the kind of list a therapist would help me make. And here I am making it for free. I’m just saying, why go through the hell of trying to convince them to help you when you can help yourself. For free!  I have to adopt this mentality or else I will not survive! I hate being a person that cannot get therapy or mental health care, but on the other hand if I was a person who could get it then I might depend on them too much and have no autonomy. 

Good and Bad News

The new person that was hired on the Houston crew of Kevin’s job quit today. I was super disappointed. I have no idea how obligated Kevin is to stay there “until they hire someone”. I am tempted to regret coming out here so soon after we decided to move here, but I’m not. It’s such a nice place and I have a nice job. I’m not sorry. Kevin said the new lady had a “rough day” yesterday in which she forgot to change her sections and the entire inventory was run together. To be fair, her first few days were spent at a store chain that doesn’t want us changing sections, so it was the first time she was expected to. Did they tell her? Shit idk. Ugh. I just miss Kevin a lot. Fuck those people. They give him a hard time too. 

On a better note,

I was off from the group home today and did side jobs. The merchandiser app offered me a route with a nice travel bonus across towns called Llano, Mason, etc. I took the offer and also looked on other apps like field agent and iVueit  for other stuff to do to and from. I stopped for gas early in the morning and saw this poor boo-boo hanging out in the front. 

I also forgot to mention here that the group home I’m working at has 8 stray cats who just came back from being TNR’d. Does anyone want one 😭. I brought cans of friskies from my own pantry and mixed it all with leftover elbows and meatballs that the ladies made. The cats loved it. I would love to find them homes! 

I think aside from the Houston setback I had a good day. I would not have left Austin if not for that travel bonus. I love driving through country areas, but I noticed I’m more cognizant and afraid of deer running out into the road now that I’ve hit one. 

 

I Did Good (1 Month in Austin)

One month ago was Fourth of July weekend when Kevin and I were anxiously awaiting our move Monday the 6th and me starting this job training class on Tuesday the 7th. I must say, we really did a good job. The only problem is that he isn’t here full time yet. They hired one new person on the Houston crew and are training her, but he will move here for good on September 1, whether they are ready or not. 

We really did great. It was honestly starting to suck over there. The AC had gone out in the guest house, except for one specific spot to lay in if you wanted AC (it didn’t circulate). Plus, the guest house had an invasion of ants that Kevin took care of with bait. They bit me all over my arms and legs, which are now scarred. It looks like I was shooting up. I wasn’t. 

My job working for gift card boss was ok, but very stressful to go to different places and families all the time. She was a nice, understanding boss, but it really did wear on me to enter different peoples homes so regularly and have to learn their routines. I would get this dread, like what if they suck and hate me?  Being the “damage control” didn’t help- it sounds like a compliment, but I would go in right after someone had a bad experience with someone else, too. 

Working at this group home is nice. It’s a little bit lower pay per hour, but I have guaranteed 40 hours, so my checks are bigger. Working overnight with clients who sleep well is a breeze- especially clients who are self sufficient enough to do their own house chores. This isn’t to say I’m without messy days. One of them has a propensity to throw up while taking morning medications, and this morning, she basically puked everywhere. I heard that she tended to do that, just hadn’t witnessed it, and she was already puking when I thought of the garbage can. Oh well. I cleaned it up. Then another one of the ladies insisted she was having seizures, but the nurse says she isn’t. I’m keeping a very close eye on her. She was ok this morning except for freaking out when she couldn’t get her shoes on. I simply bent over and loosened them and slid them on and tied them. She instantly felt better and thanked me. So it’s not all easy peasy all the time, but it’s much easier than what I was doing in Houston - because I can get used to these people and care for them on a daily basis. 

Our apartment is extremely nice. I love it. The only noise issue is that the guy upstairs walks around a lot. That’s nothing. My husband thought we would hear loud music and partying. There is also security at night. We have an Amazon locker so don’t have to worry about package thieves. We have a fitness center.  We also have a washer and dryer in our unit. I have only had that when I lived with my parents. Never in my own place. 

It does feel like we are the old kids on the block. We are probably the only empty nesters. Everyone else seems like they are single and in their 30’s at the most. There are only about 3-4 kids waiting for a school bus in the morning, in a complex of hundreds of units. 

Kevin loves it here, too. He literally can’t wait to start working for the Austin crew of his company. I can’t wait till he does either. I did ask him- please don’t volunteer me. I’m not looking to get back into that persè, but a lot of the people on the Austin crew are kind of old and have a lot of physical problems. I told him, if two or more of them keel over, I could help out on my mornings off/come in late on mornings I work till 8.  But don’t say that until/if that happens. If anyone asks what I’m up to, say I’m working in a group home- because that’s the truth! 

Some benefits to living in Austin- for me- being close to my daughter Anna. She’s moving into off campus housing 40 miles away from me in San Marcos on August 15th with five other girls including her freshman dorm roommate. I am so glad to be closer to her, especially since she prefers this area over the Houston area. Also, my side jobs, the retail audit apps, are very plentiful here. I made over $1,000 this month with them. There are probably four times the amount of those jobs here than in the Houston area, and it’s always been like that.  And for Kevin, it’s going to be working on the Austin crew. The couple that runs the Houston crew has become increasingly toxic. Kevin can’t find another job as easily as I can, because this is all he’s done for 30 years. Turns out, my dad was right when he told me to have three careers, and all the other people in his generation were wrong when they said stick with one thing forever. There are benefits to how he did it, but I have more job security. 

Austin is also pretty. Sam Houston called southeast Texas “The Great Thicket” because of all the trees and thick green grass. Austin is the beginning of the “Texas Hill Country”, so the grounds are less thick green and have more white rock under the grass. It reminds me a little of Greece, where my grandparents came from. In fact, Austin kind of reminds me of if a city was “3/4 Houston and 1/4 Greece”.  If that makes sense. 

Now that I’m not “just moved here” and “just started a job”, I can really start to set goals regarding health and fitness, money, side jobs, sewing and writing. Maybe I can do what some bloggers do and recap at the end of each week and month. In the beginning of 2026, my goal for 2026 was to bring my student loan balance under $10K down to four figures by 1/1/27. Well I don’t think that will happen, but it might if the rest of the second half goes as well as July did. Here’s to a good second half of 2026 🥂 

One Decade

Tomorrow marks ten years since the car accident death of my little cousin Evan at age 23. Evan was born in 1993, right after my parents and I moved to Arizona from Chicago. 

This week has been riddled with intrusive thoughts about the Large Marge scene in PeeWee’s Big Adventure and wondering how his immediate family is. We don’t talk much anymore. I was very close with Evan’s mother who died of cancer in 2021. 

That’s it. I don’t want to do much tomorrow, not even light a candle. 

2016 was the height of my disabling panic attacks, and I used to think Evan was the lucky one. I do not think that anymore. 

 

Anna’s Summer Job

Today was my 19 year old daughter’s last day as a YMCA 

Summer camp counselor. Today was the last day of the program. Here she is getting tp’d because she either won or lost a contest or a bet with the kids. 

Anna did a great job holding it down with a child who had an elopement issue and 9 other kids. The eloping kid mostly had his own aide with him at all times

But not always. I can’t tell you how much stress this was giving me!  It sucks having an eloper and a bunch of other kids !!!

 

So This Happened

 This morning, someone shot a BB gun at my husband’s car while he was driving to work. He said it was “probably some shit head kid having fun.” I was like- in traffic?  I’m not sure what to make of this. Do I become paranoid or??? It happened on interstate 290 just north of highway 249. Kevin will be here tomorrow evening, and I haven’t seen him for almost two weeks. He’s probably going to move here for good now. Two people have started this week on the Houston crew. That’s enough to replace him and me. I wonder who was having “fun” with the BB gun. 

Overnights

 This job is so interesting. It’s a group home for people with intellectual disabilities. The ladies in the one I work at are sort of elderly (but not that old). They are all older than me, and so are the three other staff members. 

The house supervisor, let’s call her drunk text boss. (See below). I went from gift card boss in Houston to drunk text boss haha. She takes the job very seriously. I noticed that in the beginning, she was calling the residents of the group home “the girls”. I decided on my own not to do that. I call them “the ladies”. Girls are children, to me anyway. I didn’t tell drunk text boss that I felt that way, I just started doing it. The past couple days, she’s called them “the ladies” around me too. I guess she “caught on” and “figured” that I thought girls meant children. I don’t mind what she does either way. But it was nice to see her adapt to my lingo like that. She works 8-4. The 4-midnight shift and the other overnights that I’m off are alternated between two other staff ladies that have been there decades. 

My schedule is as follows: Saturday evening to Sunday morning 8pm-8am. Sunday evening to Monday morning 8pm to 8 am. Tuesday morning midnight to 8, and Friday morning midnight to 8 (driving to work at 11pm Monday evening and Thursday evening.)

Some group homes do 8 or 12 hour shifts, and some do live in shifts, where staff members stay 2-5 days at a time and sleep on the job. This group home has a staff bedroom, and they did it like this until honestly just a couple months ago. The other two staff ladies that have been there decades aren’t used to it at all. They were getting overtime to sleep on the job, pretty much. I would have liked that arrangement too. But this new company took over a couple months ago, and they aren’t allowing staff to sleep on the clock. That also means that you can’t work the ENTIRE weekend from Friday till Monday or whatever else for several days. This company is only allowing us to work 16 hours at a time max, if that. I don’t blame them, I would run it the same way if possible. However, if the clients who live in the group home do not need constant care and sleep well through the night, then sleeping staff might make sense, especially if they get paid less on the graveyard shift. 

We have to prove that we aren’t sleeping on the job by logging into the desk computer in the office and doing bed checks every hour. When I went to training, bed checks consisted of basically looking to see if they’re breathing and/or had an accident. I always check for breathing. 32 years of working with kids and elderly and one child of my own, I look for breathing automatically. The ladies that live in this home never have accidents. I do not check for accidents. That would be an invasion of privacy imo, for them specifically. I just assume they didn’t if I  walk into the rooms and it smells ok. They’d wake up if they did have accidents anyway. 

We cannot cheat on logging bed checks, because the computer logs what time you enter it. This means if you do sleep on the job, you better be awake at least every hour to log the bed checks. Drunk text boss is on board with this and like “yeah we have to do what they say” but the other two staff ladies are outraged. It’s honestly funny and sad at the same time to listen to them become so appalled at having to do their job, and stay awake on the job lol. And these are women basically old enough to be my mother. I don’t express out loud how funny and sad I find them. I just smile and nod, because I want them on my good side. 

One of them actually said it was abuse to check on them every hour. It’s not abuse. You just don’t want to do it. 

To be honest, I could never sleep at night knowing I was getting paid to be in charge of five vulnerable people. I would be scared to death and doing their job checks anyway. Especially since like I said, people with intellectual disabilities have a slightly lower life expectancy, and these ladies are basically there. I would NOT be able to sleep at ALL. 

I do not want to mention to these to coworkers that live in caregiving jobs are all over indeed. Not a lot of people want them, because most people have a place to live. I used to like them when I was living with my parents and my daughter spent the weekend with her father. It was the perfect way to get away for a weekend and get paid for it. And I was allowed to sleep, but didn’t except for just an hour or two at a time!   They could go to any other place and do them and probably get paid better than here. I just don’t want to say it out loud, because in the new person. And they don’t seem to be holding the changes against me, which is REALLY NICE. They’re mad at the company and know it’s not “my fault”. 

I’m not sleeping very well at all, because on my shifts I have my alarm set every hour on the hour. When it goes off I do the checks. I do some household chores that don’t take long, then just hang out on the couch doing the bed checks when the alarm goes off. When 6:30 am comes around, one of the ladies checks her sugar. I start giving meds after that. The resident ladies actually make breakfast themselves. They have rotating jobs of cook and dishwasher, although this morning I was the dishwasher. Yes I’m dozing off in those interim hours between bed checks a couple times a night. Because of that and my daily 6 am Red Bull so I can focus on meds, I don’t come home and sleep immediately. I’m really just sleeping on my nights off. It has to change. 

One way I’m able to sleep during the day is if I take my anxiety meds, gabapentin. But I’m trying to only do this once a week. Gabapentin is hard to get, and I need to have a stash of it in case my anxiety gets really bad. Acquiring it is a delicate balance of finding a doctor who will prescribe it, keep prescribing it, and a pharmacy who will fill it. So far so good. I can get another three months worth on 8/21, and there will be one more refill which I can probably get November 21. Being the only thing that works for my severe anxiety though it needs to last. I can’t just be like “I’m going to pop some gabapentin just because I want to sleep today!”  If I keep that shit up, it will disappear. 

Missing my Husband

 First of all, I got a drunk text from my boss. That was hilarious. I let it go. (After I took a screenshot)

I really really miss Kevin. He went to Louisiana from Wednesday through Monday with the job. He’s coming here for good once the Houston crew hires more people, and I have had a hunch that the Houston manager has been running them off. Well Kevin told me that a guy is supposed to start tomorrow, and on the car ride back from Louisiana today, the guy called the manager’s phone twice to ask about two different things. When the second call happened, the manager’s wife yelled “Tell him to stop calling.”  I asked Kevin, was the guy on the line in order to hear her say that? Kevin didn’t know. It was funny- but at the same time, it’s not funny. 

Just a disclaimer, I know I’m supposed to be more of an independent woman and not miss my husband so much. I’m ready for the criticism that might come with saying I miss him. I’m ready for the flogging. I had my own place at least twice before I met Kevin. But now, being alone in an apartment and knowing he exists just makes me miss him. It was easier to be alone when I didn’t know who he was. 

Friday the 17th was my 48th birthday!  It was also my first night working alone at the group home. The five ladies that lived there and the three staff members all signed a card for me. That was nice! No, I didn’t receive 48 yellow roses, that’s a Google stock image! 

I feel like life is just beginning, ironically. Kevin and I really did great with picking up and moving to Austin. Some old people are mad, but wow we really like it here. 

Here are some pictures showing just how much Jordan is enjoying his new home:

This bride wore her grandmother’s wedding gown with ZERO alterations. That’s impressive. A lot of brides nowadays who are wearing their moms’ wedding gowns are taking out the poofy sleeves that were popular in the 80’s and 90’s and making them sleeveless. This gown looks like the 1950’s and fits perfectly with this era and on her granddaughter as well. 

Last but not least, I really got it easy at this job. I only work until 8 am, but the action doesn’t start until 6:30-6:45 or so. Yes I have to give these ladies medications, but they all take it. It’s only difficult when they refuse to take it. They all know exactly what they take too. It’s because we have to remind them what it is, what it’s for, and what some side effects are as we give it. This not only helps us not make an error (if we do, they speak up- for instance, I picked up a sheet of medication for the evening and the lady knew right away that it was for the evening and mentioned it just as I saw evening marked on it) but it also helps with consent and them knowing what they’re taking and not thinking they’re being “drugged”. 

I also have to log bed checks every hour at night. This takes about 30 seconds. I just make sure they’re breathing honestly. They don’t have accidents at all. It’s really laxxed there. 

 

My First Night Shift

 I worked last night from midnight until 8:00 am. I shadowed the lady who everyone thought would be pissed that I was starting, thus taking away overtime hours from her. I was ready to work alone, but they just gave me an extra shadowing shift so she wouldn’t be that upset. I was relieved to get to know her and see that she’s not “going to kick my ass” At all. She’s very cool. She talks to me in Spanglish. She goes back and forth from English and Spanish, even in the same sentence. I had coworkers 25 years ago that did that. I appreciate it when people do that, because my Spanish is terrible. I know all the words, but cannot put them together to communicate with someone. If I turn on a Spanish radio station or tv channel, I know what each word means but have no idea what they’re talking about. “Spanglish” helps get over that. 

The shift was basically watching the ladies sleep for about 6 and a half hours, then giving everyone their morning medications starting at 6:30. There are five ladies that take about 12-15 medications each, so it’s intense. I knew I was going to do it by myself with her watching this time (as opposed to watching someone else doing it), so I drank a Red Bull at 6:00 am. I wanted a lot of focus, because that is a lot of prescription medication. This caused me to not be able to sleep all day. Finally I fell asleep at 4:00 pm and woke up again at midnight. I’m off now, but am working Saturday 8pm-Sunday 8am and then Sunday evening 8pm until Monday morning 8 am. I packed a little backpack with notebooks, pens and books to read. It will be great to get back into the habit of reading and writing. 

Kevin is coming today with the furniture!  Yay!  At least the bed!  Thank God!!

Kevin was supposed to have a new coworker on the Houston crew yesterday, but she never showed up. I believe this is person number 7 that “didn’t show up”.   It’s a little clear at this point that once they talk to the Houston manager, they’re being told something unsavory, because it’s the austin manager that’s hiring them. It also seems like some of their jobs have been delegated to crews in other cities. 

Having a spouse that works for your previous employer is bewildering, because you want to ask him how his day was, but you don’t want to hear about that place at the same time. I was thinking back to my first husband, Anna’s father. When we were starting to have problems, he’d get home and I would ask how his day was. He found that annoying. Once he said to me, “You just asked me yesterday how my day was.”  Ok?  And today is a new day!!! It’s almost tempting to wish Kevin was like that, but I would not want the communication problems that come with that dynamic, either. I’m also mentally invested in the Houston crew hiring people, because when it happens, my husband can come and be with me here. 

Bathroom Rugs and Other Happenings

 

I’m currently making bathroom rugs out of a hot glue gun and denim seams that were cut off of the jeans from 25 cent day that I cut up for denim chenille quilts. This is the first one, and it’s about 50% bigger now. I also started a second one for in front of the tub, which is about 3/4 this size so far. I’m pretty sure I’ll have just enough thick denim side seams and hot glue sticks for both!  The instructions I read online said to periodically stick a straight pin through the side of the circle. I don’t think I want to do that. I don’t want to step on pins. So I just did more glue than the guy in the instructions did. 

There is another more complicated denim seam kitchen or bathroom rug technique where you use a zigzag stitch. Maybe I’ll do that one next time. 

10 Days in Austin

 Tomorrow will be 10 days. I’m exhausted. I finished the module training for my new job at the main office in Austin. Then this week, I went to the actual group homes in a town about 30 minutes west of here. I shadowed for two days. I met all of the residents, but there are two homes I haven’t been to yet. I also met most of the staff. Tomorrow night, I’m shadowing the overnight staff. Then, I will be on my own at night on the graveyard shift. 

Kevin is back in Waller and still working on the Houston crew “until they hire someone”. The thing is, they’ve hired at least six people so far “who didn’t show up”. To me, that’s a lot. Apparently, the company’s headquarters here in the Austin area is doing the hiring. Then they give the people’s information to the manager of the Houston office. The manager is claiming he’s speaking to people one time and then they don’t show up. It makes me wonder what he’s saying to them. I am suspicious that he’s trying to sabotage our move here by keeping Kevin there. Kevin disagrees adamantly, so I don’t push the idea. I keep reminding Kevin that “we already signed a lease” until October of 2027. We would not have if they hadn’t given him the transfer. Lord have mercy. I don’t think six whole people “didn’t show up” for no reason.  Kevin just talks smack when I bring it up. He said, “If he doesn’t want it to be just him and his wife” then he needs to retain people. And that he’ll be here “by September 1”.  

It’s very hard to leave a job and then have a spouse continue to work there because I hear about it still. And I can’t not hear about it because I can’t not ask Kevin how his day was. It’s not my place of employment anymore, so I should let it go. 

I also kind of want Kevin here with me. I want my furniture too. I am not going to buy an air mattress, because I have cats and their claws put holes in them. My back hurts from sleeping on the memory foam thing only. Good thing I have a bath tub now!  

I binge watched all 8 episodes of the Netflix adaptation of Little House on the Prairie. I loved it!  I did not like the CGI wolves!  Someone online said it would have been better with trained Malamutes, and I agree!  Aside from that scene, though, it was awesome!  Yes there was too much of an age difference between Laura and Mary with Carrie. But there was the same issue with the Handmaid’s Tale vs The Testaments. But I guess with adaptations, that happens. 

There are a couple of disappointments with my new job. First of all, I said I was glad that I would be working with adults who have developmental disabilities instead of elderly, because elderly people die on you too often. The home I shadowed most in is full of ladies between about 60-72 years old. Sadly, with developmental disabilities, that’s roughly the life expectancy, and the woman I shadowed said there was another lady who passed away less than a year ago. The other house was also ladies about 45-55 or so. I just let it go. I also believe we end up where we end up for a reason. They were willing to hire me even though I didn’t have an address yet, and that’s huge. Speaking of the Netflix Little House- one of the ladies who lives in the group home was asking me what similarities the Netflix adaptation had to Michael Landon’s Little House. She asked, “What characters are in it?  Pa and Ma?”  I said, “Yes, and also Mary and Laura”. She asked, “What about Carrie?” I gave the spoiler, “Carrie is born in episode 6.”  She said, “So Grace wasn’t born yet?” I said, “No, Grace isn’t born yet.”  She then asked, “What about Albert?”  I explained, “No there is no Albert in this one, because this one more closely follows the book, and Albert wasn’t in the book or in real life.  He was made up for the old show.”  She looked kind of shocked. I actually think she was disappointed to find out Albert didn’t really exist.  That expression passed though, and after she asked if Nellie Olson was in it, I explained, “Nellie Olson isn’t in it because they’re not in Walnut Grove yet. The Netflix show shows them living in Kansas, Kansas not working out, and them deciding to go to Walnut Grove at the very end. So Nellie will probably be in next season.”  She was so satisfied with that she forgot about Albert being fictional. 

I got a new audible credit, and with it I bought another book about writing. In it, there’s a chapter on tropes. The author asks, “What are some tropes that don’t seem realistic to you?” I thought to myself- the Woke Caroline Ingalls trope from this Netflix Little House. Caroline wasn’t woke!  

Another thing about my new job is that according to the ladies I shadowed, some of the other staff is going to be disappointed that I’m there and “taking their overtime away”. I’m a little worried they’ll take their disappointment out on me personally, but I’ve already met one of the ones who’s supposedly “so pissed” and she was very cordial to me. We’ll see how she is when I shadow her tomorrow night. Overtime is never permanent. 

One of my biggest regrets of the past year was allowing the Houston manager’s wife at my husband’s job to run me off. I’m never allowing that to happen again. If I could go back and undo that one thing, I would. So I’m definitely not going to let it happen again.  If someone is upset that they no longer get overtime, then they need to learn that overtime comes and goes. I’ve had to learn it, so will they. And the lady that trained me?  She is having surgery on August 4. Overtime is coming back. I’m digging my heels in with bitches. 

Yay, Sleep (& Work Training)

 Yesterday after work, I went to HEB. I knew this little fact about the city of Austin, but I forgot- the grocery stores here don’t give plastic bags. You either have to BYOB, buy canvas ones at the checkout, or throw individual items into your car. I bought five and stored them in my pantry. I told my daughter this last night, and now she wants to make reusable bags for herself and for me. 

I slept about 12 hours last night, which felt great. Some of the training modules at work looked like the print was shrinking about 2-3:00 pm. It wasn’t. It was just me. 

A lot of the training modules are common sense, but there are a lot of them that are teaching things I’ve never learned before. For instance, I know what discrimination is, I know about how to prevent falls and what to do in case of falls. I know about seizures, I know about choking and safe swallowing, etc. But this is a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. It’s not something I’ve done before. I have worked with elderly people in their homes, and I have worked with kids. Not this, although I have cared for younger adults in their homes who had developmental disabilities through the other company I worked for in the past. 

This is something I didn’t know- back in 2014, there was an entire federal law passed to ensure that people with disabilities aren’t kept out of the community like they have been in the past. I don’t remember the exact name of it, but it’s basically saying they have the right to go places and do things. You might often hear older people say things like, “Everyone is disabled now!” And act like it’s a new epidemic or phenomenon. I’ve heard my mom say that before. But this isn’t the case- it’s just that when they were younger, disabled people were kept away from society in institutions, and they weren’t aware of them. 

Another training module was on “PBS” or “Positive Behavior Support” and it was a handful of terms from ABA. Some might remember this, but in the beginning of this year I spent 8 days as a trainee in an ABA facility, and I found it extremely weird, counterintuitive, and unethical. This was a center that did ABA on very young children from M-F 8-5. Not a group home for adults like this. I did some googling for “Is PBS ABA?” And discovered that it’s just sort of-semi based on it?  But it’s nowhere near as controlling or arbitrary. There are also several training modules on the importance of these individuals having choices and autonomy, so it can’t possibly be the ABA I remember from that horrific 8 days in February. 

I also found out that there is an actual ABA company called Positive Behavior Support- and it’s the worst of the worst. But it’s not the “method” of PBS. It’s the actual company name, and they do ABA. 🤦🏻‍♀️ There is a lot of information to dig through. If anyone wants to educate me in the comments, please do. 

All in all, I am thankful for the opportunity to work full time with the same people in the same place every day. Trying to learn the routines of different people constantly was stressful. This is also going to be the night shift, midnight until 8:00 am. So what my shift will look like is probably 3/4 watching people sleep/oversee if they get up at night and 1/4 morning routines. I can definitely deal with that. 

Hopefully I can get more housework done today!