Know how I know I’m old?

Today is my birthday.

The big 2-7!!

It’s going to be a big year, I’m sure of it. If you are a reader of my blog you know that this is officially the age that I thought I would be having children. LoDown reminded me today that 27 is the age when our eggs start to die off. Women actually start to become infertile at the age of 27. Great. I guess I better get on that. But I can’t help but feel that I am doomed before I’ve even began… 

Just had a thought… what happens when I turn 30? Will I have to change the title of my blog? Hmmm…

Anyway, because it’s my birthday and I am officially turning old, I thought that I would share my day with you. It’s the start of a very important chapter of my life… I can feel it. And I can promise you that being in my LATE twenties will still provide both you and I with many laughs and many adventures. It’s not over yet. I may be approaching 30 but I am still a twenty something.

Today, was a very lovely birthday. And because TODAY was a lovely birthday, I know that I am getting old. Today I woke up at 10am to 13 text messages and 2 voice mails… all with wonderful birthday wishes. Now, again, if you know me you know that my work day does not start until 10am so if you did not get a response… that’s why.

Side bar- I feel like this might be the last year that my day is able to start at 10am. Once kids are in the picture, I know that’s out the window.

First item of business as a 27 year old: Pick up dog poop. Wednesday is the day our lawn mower people come and to be honest, I haven’t been so kind to them in the pick-up-the-poop department so I figured I would do them a favor and clean up after my little man.

Second thing I did was make a protein shake. Yes, I am officially old when I have to get myself on a cleanse diet just to get my body working the right way again. Trust me, I can’t eat like I used to. And I certainly can’t drink like I used to. I really feel like I put my SDSU education to shame when I get these hang overs now… Sad times.

Next I watched two episodes of ‘Say Yes to the Dress’. I love this show. It’s a weakness I have. Even though I am already married and quite happy to have all the wedding mess behind me, I still enjoy watching other women try on their white dress and spend WAY too much money on something they will only wear once. It’s like a drug. Usually I limit myself to one episode before I get to work, but hey… it was my birthday today.

After two episodes, which put me right around noon, I headed up stairs to the office. As I walked up the stairs I found a very unexpected birthday gift from my puppy Harper. He had chewed up my pillow case and brought it out to the top of the stairs so I would be sure to see it. How kind. Of course he was nowhere to be found… and this was quite unexpected considering he hasn’t chewed up anything in at least 3 months… hmm… I guess to a dog, that would be quite a gift. So I forgave him that. I felt much better about the situation when I checked my email and facebook where I had 64 waiting birthday wishes!! 64 by noon!! Thank goodness for facebook reminding everyone that it’s my birthday! I really felt quite special! I was very touched by the amount of people who took the time just to write a happy little note. Lovely start to the work day.

Then I made all my phone calls… the one’s I had been putting off… but I figured that on my birthday I wanted to feel accomplished. And yes, after checking off ALL the items on my to-do list, I closed up my business day around 3pm. I had showered somewhere in between calls and invite making… so by 3 I was already ready to hit the road and run some errands.

I hit up the dry cleaning across the street only to find out that they are closing in 2 weeks! Sad day!! Now I will have to go all the way across town for my dry cleaning… strike that… for Burny’s dry cleaning. So that was kind of a bummer. On the way across town, I stopped at the post office and mailed out some samples (I guess the work day wasn’t done after all). And then I headed home to find that Harper had left me yet another birthday gift, that thoughtful guy. This time he had chewed up the plastic piece on the corner of my bed. What was going on?? But again, I felt much better when I returned to my facebook page to see that I had at least 20 more birthday wishes. I have to say… this birthday in particular was the most widely recognized it would seem. EVERYONE sent me their love. It was wonderful.

At around 4pm, I turned on a recorded call for work (okay… so work wasn’t done at all) and swept and mopped my floors. I also dusted, and cleaned the burners in my kitchen. And after the call was done, I vacuumed. It was at this point that I realized Harper had ripped up 4 new holes in the lawn. He was really on a roll with these birthday gifts for mom… Kind of over kill really.

At 5 I got the mail where 2 birthday cards were waiting… with money!! Got to love that. Nice timing too… I’m terrible at that. And then I got a delivery from the UPS man with ALL of my Holiday products for Arbonne. It was like Christmas on my birthday. I knew it was coming of course, and I had paid for it so technically it wasn’t a gift, but man did it feel like one.

At 6pm I came downstairs to find Harper chewing on one of the brand new Arbonne product that I had just taken out of the box. By then I was livid!! I mean come on!!!!! It was time for the crate. We haven’t been crating him for some time now, and ironically enough, we had taken the crate down and put it in the garage THIS morning… but alas, it didn’t last long out there. He is still a puppy it would seem.

At 7pm I crated Harper and took myself to a movie: Eat Pray Love. It was great. It really got me thinking about traveling and how lucky I am to have been where I’ve been and seen what I’ve seen. It left me feeling very content with where I am, which is good because where I am is oldsville!

So how do I know I’m old?? Well… today was a great birthday. Getting work done, cleaning, eating absolutely no mexican food or drinking any alcohol… and still it was a good day. That’s how I know I’m old.

Life goes on…

It’s a tearin’ up my heart Tuesday so you can bet that this entry won’t be a happy/funny one…

I was reminded, last night, of something very sad when I was inputting Arbonne orders on my computer, and then reminded again today so I figured it was a sign that the time is right to write.

When I was placing the orders I realized that one of the women who was signing up as a preferred client had the same name as me, but it was spelled differently. She spelled it with an ‘i’ at the end instead of a ‘y’. I bring this up because if she had not had the same name as me, I would have missed this connection entirely. I would have entered the name and not thought another thing about it. But she DID have the same name as me and so I looked closer. Isn’t life funny that way? And when I looked closer, I recognized the last name and my stomach dropped…

She is the mother of a friend of mine who committed suicide last year. A friend of mine who I have been thinking about a lot recently. A friend who I am always thinking about now, and maybe should have thought more about before…

Not Tim. I realize that I only just recently wrote a blog about Tim committing suicide, but I have to point out that this is someone ELSE. I guess the saddest part about this entry is just that; I know more than one person who has done this.

Is that a reflection on me? I can’t help but wonder…

So as soon as I recognized her name, I felt this incredible sense of sadness for her. I know that we are coming up on the one year anniversary of his death and yet, here she is just ordering skin care and nutrition products.

Now please do not misunderstand me… that is exactly what she SHOULD be doing. What else can she do but go on with her life? But at the same time, with every letter on that page in her handwriting, I knew that she HAD to be thinking of LogDawg. She just had to be. Every single moment of her life just has to be devoted to thinking about him now… especially since this only just happened a year ago.

A year ago Thursday I found out today.

As soon as I recognized the name, I text messaged my friend who hosted the event and told her that I didn’t realize she too, had known LogDawg. I knew that his death happened in July but I guess I hadn’t given much thought to the date.

Thursday will be one year.

One year later and the world is still spinning.

Every time I go to write an email to a person whose name starts with ‘L’, his email pops up. I can’t bring myself to erase it from my list. Everytime I scan my friends on facebook, his name is there. When I go to his page I am so painfully reminded of how much people are thinking about him and how much he hurt everyone with the decision he made… people still write on his facebook page everyday.

I wonder if he knows.

I wonder if he has ANY idea of how much he hurt EVERYONE. I’m sure he had to have known his mother would be devastated… his father, his younger brother… maybe he didn’t think his friends would care. I mean, maybe that’s why he did it after all, but LogDawg was not a loner. He had tons of friends. Friends who would have done anything to help him… if only we had known.

I have to wonder, as I am sure everyone in this position would, did he really mean to do it? Did he mean to go through with it? Had he thought of this before or was it a spur of the moment type thing? Was he just drunk? Did he really think there was no reason to live? That it wouldn’t get better? Was this just meant to be a call for help? I have to think that that is the case… but then why did he succeed? He must have meant it…

And now his Mom and all of us will have to live with that for the rest of the life that he chose NOT to live.

It’s just not fair.

I said it with Tim, and I mean it here too… it’s selfish. It’s possibly the most selfish thing that someone can do and I can’t help but be pissed off. I’m sorry if that is not the appropriate response, but I just want to shake him and tell him that I’m just pissed. And of course, I want to know why. I wish I could just ask him why he did it. Why? It just doesn’t make any sense.

I remember getting the text message from my sister when she found out. I was out of service and so I got it a few hours later. It was short and to the point:

LogDawg killed himself this week.

What?

I had to read it about 10 times before I could believe it. And then I still had to call her to confirm that I was understanding correctly.

I was shocked.

You’re always shocked when you get this sort of news, but I have to say that I was just so shocked because it was LogDawg. When Tim was gone, I knew and accepted it right away because it made sense after the fact. All the signs were there, as I mentioned in that blog. But not with LogDawg. It just didn’t make any sense, and because of that… because I knew that he had everything to live for and dozens of great friends that would have been there for him… I just couldn’t accept it.

I left work early for the funeral.

The place was absolutely packed. I had to have my sister save me a seat . My mom came. Friends. Adults. Family. He had friends there who had driven through the night to be there. Friends who got on a plane when they couldn’t even afford to eat because they were starving college students. All friends who would have done the same thing if he would have only asked…

Does he know that now? Can he see us?

Apparently he had recently split with his on again off again girlfriend… I don’t know how mad you have to be at a person to leave them behind thinking for the rest of their life that you did this because of them.

She was sitting a few pews over from Log’s family…

I’ll never forget how Log’s Dad got up and grabbed her and brought her over to sit with the family. It makes me cry even now just thinking about it. That really struck me. People come and go in our lives and sometimes it’s meant to be that way, sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it breaks our heart… but LIFE GOES ON!

Life SHOULD go on.

For Logs… it doesn’t now. He made one choice and now life doesn’t go on for him. Instead he passed all that sadness, hatred, pain and suffering onto all of us. And instead of just moving forward like Logs would have eventually done, we now have to carry that around for him. And that type of pain doesn’t go away. It doesn’t fade.

And I could just feel all of that looking at his Mother’s handwriting…

All of it.

But if Log’s Mom can continue to live her life after losing her son… how bad could Log’s life have been? I can’t imagine anything worse than losing a child. I can’t think of a better reason to want to die, but she is living her life even still. She is strong. I admire her and feel for her so much. And again, I just want to slap Logs for doing this. I just want to tell him that it would have gotten better… it has to. It does.

Life always goes on and here we are… one year later.

I am sure facebook will be flooded with comments in the coming week and I can’t say that I won’t post something myself. It’s all just proof that we’re all still here and he’s not. We are all still here feeling whatever we feel. I wish he could see how much he impacted all of us…I hope he does. And I wish he could have seen that life does go on… even after something as hard as this.

I’m in a mood

Ever just have one of those days? As the picture on my blog clearly shows, I do sometimes… and today is one of those days…

I am in a horrible mood for no good reason at all. Of course I am stressed about moving and money (the ever present stress… but it’s improving) and life in general… and it doesn’t help to be having that monthly fun time, as I like to call it, but yes… today is definitely one of those days.

So today,  I am going to go on a rampage. This rampage is aimed at AT&T!

Today, on facebook, my good friend Lizzard posted something about being mad at AT&T and the Woodland Police Department. Upon further investigation, I discovered that AT&T is trying to royally screw her, as well as many other of her facebook friends and fellow commenters. And the Woodland PD has no tolerance for solving bill problems over the phone while driving (another perk of Nevada… can talk on my phone again!!) Apparently there are many ongoing lawsuits against AT&T all the time because they are always trying to screw people.

What is the deal?

AT&T is totally monopolizing the market, I have to say, and it’s totally ridiculous and unfair. It’s the only cell phone service that actually has service where I now live in Nevada, and it’s basically going to be our only real option for internet there, which is really telling about other cell phone companies, but anyway…Lizzard states her problem as follows:

“I have AT&T for my Internet and I wanted to upgrade my package (and pay more), so they told me I’d have to cancel my current package and pay $150 termination fee and then sign up for the upgraded package. Talk about a load of crap! And then I got a ticket for talking on my cell phone while driving because speaker phone doesn’t count if you’re holding the phone. So frustrating!”

Now that is ridiculous… on both accounts. It has just now occurred to me that perhaps the PD is in cahoots with the phone companies. They make a law that requires every California resident to purchase more phone gadgets from the phone companies (i.e. hands free devices), because clearly speakerphone is not a viable option! I digress…

AT&T: their family plan is also a joke. My husband and I can decide between plan one) way too few minutes for the two of us to share or plan two) more minutes than we could ever hope to talk through. We have 10,000 rollover minutes because when we were on the lesser plan, we over shot every month and had to pay unsightly fees… and now that we are on the upgraded plan, we pay for minutes that we are clearly not using. Now, if we were to downgrade now, because we have sooooooo many rollover minutes, we would lose them all. How on earth does that work? We have paid for those minutes. We have earned them. It’s madness!!! And the one time we did throw a fit about the over charges when we were on the lesser plan, they took like $100 off our bill, which only goes to show me that most of America is just rolling over and taking it in the butt and when you raise a stink, they take off the charges no problem because they know the charges are unfair. It’s just absurd!

How is this happening? There must be something we can do. If I were more political, I would start a petition for something! But for now, this blog will have to do. It will have to satisfy me and hold all my pent up aggression towards ‘The Man.’… whatever that means….

Luke Wilson… you’re all they got man!