Footprints on the Moon

I’m slowly but surely starting to feel better, and it couldn’t come soon enough. I finally have gotten to the point where I don’t need multiple doses of decongestants just to be able to breathe enough to make it through the day. I’ll take decongestants if I need to, but sometimes I feel like I sacrifice a little mental clarity to get some nasal clarity. For example, I was asked to make a post about prohormones, and I swear I’ve stared at that keyword all week and the most I can come up with is prohormones = body building. Somehow, I don’t think that’s quite enough for a blog post!

I’ve got a cough that’s driving me crazy (short trip), and a bit of a runny nose, but for the most part I can breathe and I don’t need the assistance of too many OTC drugs to make that happen. Really though, I’m just so ready to stop being so worn out. I can’t remember the last time a cold sapped my energy like this. I’ve been in bed early every night this week… I’m very excited that tomorrow is Saturday. I have no plans so I can stay in bed just as long as I want to.

And since that is the case, I think I’m going to start that immediately! Goodnight!

Apparently, the formula for sleeping well is 1 dose of decongestants + 1 stint delivering papers. I managed to keep my eyelids pried open until about 7:15 last night. It was at that point that I was laying on the couch watching TV, coughing, and practically holding my eyelids open. That was all I could take, and when my phone stopped ringing (seriously, the one night I’m definitely headed to bed early and it was Grand Central Station around here!) I went to bed. Usually I read, journal or do both. Last night, I walked into the bedroom, shut off the light and went to sleep.

I didn’t wake up until 5am. WOOHOO! I am the type of person who ALWAYS gets up in the middle of the night. Usually to go to the bathroom, but to peek at the clock, roll over and get more comfortable at the very least. Not last night! I woke up, peeked at the clock and it was 5:06am. My alarm goes off at 5:15! Can’t beat that. So there you go… if you ever need a formula for sleeping well when you haven’t been, go get yourself a cold and a paper route. You’ll be out in no time!

Even with all that sleep last night though, I’m still exhausted. Must be all that coughing. As soon as this last pan of cookies comes out of the oven, I’m headed for bed!

Well, guys, my stint as a paper delivery person lasted one whole day. It was absolutely miserable! Not that I expected it to be fabulous and glamorous, but still. It was a lot of in and out of the car, and there’s an apartment complex on the route that required being up and down 3 flights of stairs. After dragging myself out of bed at 2 oclock in the morning!

In the end, the thing that made me decide that it wasn’t for me was the fact that I barely made it to work on time. The paper isn’t flexible, and if something were to come up and I would have to abandon the paper route to make it to work on time I would potentially be facing some fees and other liabilities due to breach of contract. Anything can happen… weather, car issues, just getting sick… I just don’t want to have to be stressed out every morning that I’m not going to make it to work on time because it took me too long to deliver papers. I like my current job, it’s my priority, and I can’t jeopardize that in the name of extra income.

So I called left a message with the paper (cause I’m not getting out of bed at 2 oclock in the morning just to call and say I’m not coming!) letting them know that I decided not to take the route due to the potential scheduling conflicts. So it’s back to the drawing board on a second job, since I won’t be making my millions with commercial real estate or paper delivery. I’m going to be looking for something in the evening hours. I’d rather find something that might lead to me sacrificing a little sleep on the front end and not have to worry about being late for work.

Gasp, shock! I didn’t participate in Self Portrait Sunday yesterday! Shockingly enough, I was actually presentable looking for a couple of hours for my interview, church and the like. I didn’t think to get a picture in that couple hour window, however, and by the time I thought about it, I was too snot-encrusted and miserable to even consider sharing a picture of myself in such a state!

I did end up going to one of the urgent care facilities yesterday… I can’t afford to miss time at work, but I don’t want to get everyone sick either. So it was off to find out whether or not I was contagious and to get some good drugs. After an hour of waiting, and the doctor spending a grand total of 30 seconds with me, she declared that I have “just a cold”, I’m not drinking enough water because my pee isn’t clear (uh, I have to be practically water-toxic to have clear pee, just saying), oh and to stop taking decongestants. Ha! I’m miserable, and you want me to stop taking medications that make living tolerable? You better have some better options for me than that! In the end, I’m not sure that I buy that it’s only a cold. I’ve had lots of colds, and I’ve NEVER had my ears hurt like this for a COLD.

The “interview” went alright. Was less of an interview and more of a “sign this paper and I’ll call you in a couple days” sort of thing. I’ll be headed into the warehouse at 3am tomorrow morning though, so we’ll see what I think. You get a couple weeks to be a temporary contract person before you decide that yes, you can hack 7day a week deliveries and never call off sick. I don’t expect it to be easy, but we’ll see how it goes. If I don’t have a life, that’s fine. I don’t need a life right now, I need to pay my bills. My real concern is whether being up that much earlier would make it difficult for me to get through my regular work day. I’m typically the type of person that needs a full 8 hours of sleep, so this should be interesting!

This morning was a lovely waste of time. I rescheduled my interview with the lady from the newspaper because of CPR training this morning. I had to be at work at 7am for a 4+hour mandatory training session. I was back home by 20 after 8. Not that I’m complaining about getting out so quickly, but there was a bit of “I got out of bed so early on a Saturday for that?” We’ve all been previously certified, so we just reviewed the basics, took the tests, and took off. And I get paid for the full four hours.

It was definitely good it ended early. I’ve spent the rest of the day lounging around like a bum and using about 3837 boxes of kleenex. I started sniffling a little bit on Thursday, some sinus stuff, and by last night I was full out miserable! Today, it’s escalated even more with a very sore throat that’s making my right ear SO PAINFUL. I ran over to my mom’s so she could take a peek at my throat (cause it’s kind of hard to look at your own throat, and the cats’ official medical opinion is “feed me”), and she thinks it looks like strep. Boo!

Of course I have my interview tomorrow morning, which I’ve already rescheduled once. Is it automatically a bad interview if you give your new boss an illness? From there, I believe I shall be headed to one of the outpatient urgent-care places that is open on the weekends. And now I think I shall be headed towards bed where I will beg God for relief.

Recently, I discovered, or rediscovered as the case may be, the blogs of several of the pastors on staff at my church. After catching up on some of their more recent thoughts, I added them to my Google reader so that I wouldn’t “lose” those blogs again. If you don’t use Google reader, they have a feature on the home page where they suggest feeds for you based on the feeds you are currently subscribed to. Since I now have several people from the church, they are suggesting the blogs of other church writers. I clicked on one and was reading back a few entries to see if it was something I might be interested in reading in the future. It was a blog of someone who used to be on staff at my church, and he was blogging notes on a conference he was at. Most of it was things that were said that stood out to him, but I had to laugh when I found this bullet point:

“There’s something hanging from Ed’s sweater. Is it a button? It’s flopping around. Nice sweater though. Wonder if he shops at the Buckle…”

That’s how easy it is to get distracted! Last night at church, I had something equally small grab my attention for awhile. There are lights on the edge of the stage for the current weekend series, and at the beginning of the service, the lights were off, pointed directly into the air. I’m sitting to the left of the stage (with the band, I felt kind of like a groupie!) and I’m trying to look past them to the person speaking on the platform when I see it. There… the one in the middle… there’s a hair attached to it. A long hair, just flowing in the breeze. I was listening to what was being said, but I just kept watching that hair. Eventually, they turned on the lights, the lights rotated and I lost sight of the hair. Phew.

A couple weeks before that, Dr. Bob was writing on the white board, and he misspelled a word. He didn’t notice, and just moved on. But I was stuck on that misspelled word. I can’t remember what word it was now, but I’m thinking it was “heathly” instead of “healthy.” I heard someone further down the row whisper to the person next to them “he spelled that wrong.” I heard the same thing from a row or two behind me. It was almost like a ripple through the room. Dr. Bob kept teaching, we all moved on, but I can’t help but wonder how many people missed that point he was making because of that misspelling.

What’s my point? I’m not sure I have one… I just thought it was interesting to see just how easy it was to get my attention off of what was important and onto something trivial. And while I’m at it, Dr. Bob, what did Seinfeld say?

I’ve been thinking about picking up a second job for a couple of weeks. After I sat down to work on my budget, I realized that knuckling down and getting serious about paying down debt wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought. There’s really not a whole lot of wiggle room there. One of the things I’ve been considering is getting a paper route. The local paper is delivered 7 days a week, the delivery drivers don’t have to deal with collections and it fits nicely into my current schedule. Right now I get to work at 6:45am, and papers have to be delivered by 6am.

Anyways, I’ve left messages with various district managers that had open routes, and I finally got to talk to a real live human being this morning!! We chatted, I found out her warehouse is only about 2 blocks away from my apartment, and I set up an interview for 8am on Saturday morning. Woohoo! Yeah, not really. My spidey sense was tingling… oh yeah… apparently I need to get myself a Technomarine watch, or at least a calendar! I can’t have an interview at 8 am on Saturday. I have to be at my first job for mandatory training at 7am. That is clearly not going to work. So I had to call back and ask if we could reschedule, and you guessed it, I got to leave another voicemail. *headdesk* The worst part? I DO have a calendar… it was sitting less than a foot to my left when I was scheduling my interview and it says right on it in big letters “CPR 7am”. Brilliant, I tell you.

Fingers and toes crossed for me, please. I really need to get some extra money coming in soon.

I just had to laugh today. We have a health and safety department where I work, and one of the things they focus on is ergonomics. They’ve trained people in pretty much every department to be ergonomic facilitators, I put in a bunch of work orders to have employees’ work surfaces moved up an inch, down two inches, move the keyboard trays, that sort of thing. They “yell” at me all the time for hyperextending my wrists while typing, and for leaning on the desk, or to the side while I’m reading things online. (If only they could see my posture when I’m at home, leaned back with one leg propped up on the edge of the desk!)
Why is that funny? Well, because today was work order day. I processed the work orders for the week. I also helped my friend Amy put together packets, and stuff packages for a study she’s doing. By the end of the day, I managed to give myself not one, not two, but THREE papercuts. And nicked my knuckle on the tape dispenser. Somehow, I don’t think posture correction is my biggest safety issue at work! And can someone explain to me why paper cuts manage to hurt so much? It’s just a tiny little cut, but it really stings– especially the one right on the pad of my finger. I can’t help but accidentally press on it!

I’ve been trying to make a lot of changes right now. As you know from my blogging about it here, one of those is church and God and faith. I’ve been reading, hearing, and thinking about living with intention. Jason talked on Thursday night about how what we choose to do with our anger will define us. I was listening to the message online, and one thing that had me scrambling for a pen and a paper to write down was the following thought, “I’m angry because I feel deprived. I’m depriving myself– I’m angry with everyone I meet because I’m not letting God love me.” I wrote it down, underlined it, and wrote WOW in big letters underneath it. I’ve struggled a lot with my self image… I find myself thinking that there is something about me that is inherently unlovable. It’s not true. And there’s a God out there who is crazy about me, and loves me more than I can imagine. Maybe it’s not that I’m unlovable, but that I don’t LET Him love me. And what does that look like?

What if I got up in the morning and started my day with God? What if, instead of hitting the snooze button for 15 minutes, I got up and read my Bible? What if, instead of getting out of the shower and sitting down at the computer to read about which celebrity is or is not taking hoodia… instead I had breakfast with Jesus? What would that look like? What would that do to my morning, my day, my week, my LIFE? If instead of drifting through life, I got up in the morning and moved with intention? Wow… it could only be a good thing. It’s starting already.

I took this picture right when I got home from church this afternoon. I had big plans to get the picture taken, uploaded, and blogged… clearly that didn’t happen! I took the picture… and I got lunch… and I went through the grocery ad to put together a list for the store… then I started reading a book. Halfway through a chapter on mortgage lenders, I decided it was time for a nap! Hopefully I don’t regret that in a half hour or so when I’m ready to go to bed!
My mom called about 3 minutes after I got up and she had Killian. I ended up taking my work clothes over to her house to wash, you know, so I don’t end up going to work naked tomorrow. They tend to frown upon that.
I hope you guys had a good Sunday! Mine was good, but I’m sad it’s over. That means it’s only a matter of time until the alarm clock is ringing at 5:15am!