surprise! i'm not dead yet.

wow.  if you're reading this, i must really give you props.  instead of seeing my crap pop up in your blogroll and saying, 'that lame bitch?  she hasn't said anything to anyone in four months, and then she comes back and wants us to pay attention to her?  fuck that!' and scrolling on, you clicked.

hi.  i'm a lame bitch who hasn't said anything to anyone in four months, and now i expect you to pay attention to me.

so in our last meeting, we discussed how crazy busy my life was: work full time.  school full time.  no time for sleep, cat cuddling, or anything really.  i mean, i had time for things.  just not as much as i wanted.  i like taking time for, you know.  nothing.  video games.  watching a movie by myself because awesome husband @_antgas won't watch 'twilight' movies with me.

since early march (when i last posted) i've had another birthday, finished my monday night class as well as another semester at school, purged a bunch of my mother's stuff that i was holding onto for some reason.... oh, i also moved and quit my job.

wait, what?  i know.

that full time job with the paycheck and the awesome benefits?  yeah, i quit.  i accepted a position with a social program at a behavioral rehab center.  about 15 hours a week and nowhere near what i was making per hour.  it's three evenings a week, and i help make juice and iced tea and dinner for a group of people who are in recovery or live in group homes or whatever.  then i help clean up from dinner and drive a bunch of them home.  there are addicts in recovery, schizophrenics, some guy that i have NO idea what is wrong with him but i've been told never to shake his hand and to wash my hands immediately if i ever do, and people who live in group homes for different reasons.  one woman has a doll that i've seen her spoon feed and talk to.  which i thought was weird at first, but the woman is actually really nice and pretty normal otherwise.

not EXACTLY in the vein of work that i'm training for, but it's in the broad field of 'helping'.  so it counts as 'in my field'.  it's the first job i've ever had that's in 'the field' of social work.  of course, i'm the only person there who's working in the field and not just a client.  but it's definitely eye-opening, as well as good hours and much less stressful.

i'm also helping out my dad one day a week at his place in queens.  it's a family owned business and his secretary administrative assistant up and quit a couple of months ago.  dad's been buried in work since then, so i offered myself up one day a week (for much better pay per hour) to help dig him out.  it's a 3 hour commute round trip, but it's nice to be able to help him out and make a few extra bucks.

and we moved.  if you didn't know, awesome husband and i lived communally in a house with my brother and his fiancee; we shared the kitchen and laundry room.  it was working out well and saving everyone a bit of money, but awesome husband @_antgas and i decided we needed to be on our own.  we were having some issues.

marriage is hard work, y'all.

we decided we needed to be on our own for so many reasons.  but when i started thinking about it, in our eight and a half years of marriage, we've lived alone for 17 months.  when we were first married, we lived with my mom and brother for a couple of years.  it was a mutually beneficial plan because my mom needed our help with crap around the house, and we couldn't afford a decent place to live on our own.  when we moved to florida, my mom was laid off and sold her house, so she came to florida and lived communally with us.  and then when my mom died, we moved back to new york and moved in communally with my brother.  so this is kind of like the first place that's ours.  we're renting a two bedroom apartment in a nice little town on the south shore of long island - not too far south.  not too close to the water - not going through that again.

we spent a few weeks moving and paying double rent.  between painting the new place, moving our crap, and cleaning the old place, it felt like MONTHS between the old and new places.  but i dropped off the old keys on monday and now we just have to see what we get back for our deposit.  we had some carpet damage that i'd like to think is in line with 'normal wear and tear' after living there for two years and being great tenants who never paid late or caused problems.

perhaps one of the most amazing things that happened during the course of the move is that i decided i was not going to cart all of mom's stuff around any more.   we realized that we wouldn't have room for some of our stuff, like my huge china closet... so we wouldn't have room for the mikasa stemware or china that we never use.  i made a list of my stuff that we were going to have to sell or donate, and realized that i had boxes upon boxes upon boxes of my mom's stuff that i didn't even know about.  when she died and we packed up the house in florida, awesome husband @_antgas took some time off work and packed for me while i worked and ignored all of my mom's stuff.  it was just too new for me. so we brought basically all of her stuff up to new york with us without going through it.  we only went through her clothes really because i wasn't about to cart around all of a dead woman's clothes.

we went through everything.  i found three boxes of quimper china that i sold for $100 to a woman who collected it (and i may have contributed to her hoarding.... ergh.)  i found a box of nancy drew books that i decided to hang onto and see what they're worth.  i found a tote full of pots and tupperware.  yes.  i found a box of candelwick that we decided to donate.  we went through it all.  and we pared it down to maybe three boxes of her things that i can't or won't get rid of.  and now i can box them back up and hide them again until i'm ready.

but it was very cathartic.  i got the feeling that it was time to purge and make changes.  and awesome husband @_antgas and i have purged a lot of crap and made a lot of changes.  and it feels pretty good.

now we're in a new apartment, in a new town.  the cats are settling in, we're down to just a couple of boxes of crap to unpack, and it feels like we're setting off on a new adventure, a new chapter of our life together.  it feels pretty good.