There is no turmoil going on and no issues that have presented barriers to life. We’re loving each other, taking care of one another, honoring and cherishing on a daily basis.

Waking up in the morning enjoying each others presence.

Taking care of the work that we’ve been tasked with great finesse.

Then coming home to the chores that daily life makes known and relaxing, letting the uck that life adheres to us, so that we can recoup and regather our wits.

But nothing extraordinary except for contentment has been occurring. And, we’re perfectly happy with that.

Yup, I woke up happy. SYRUPY OVER THE TOP BRIMMING WITH F&ING HAPPINESS!! Why might you ask? Well, let me tell you!
-We’re going to have brunch with a great friend whom my husband is trying to get her a job at his company. This isn’t a bite you in the ass situation because this chick can totally do the work.
-I’m going to get my first facial in ten years!
-My husband was awarded by the CEO of his new ‘old’ employer two tickets to tonight’s major league baseball game, right behind home plate in a luxury suite and a reserved parking pass. We get to be VIPs!

The only downer is my weight and I’m not even going to let me get me down. I’m going to stretch, walk and enjoy my body and how it functions today and make it stronger for tomorrow.

So, if any unhappy thoughts, bad ideas or foul moods want to ruin my sunshine, it’s not going to happen. I’m teflonning my good mood.

Sunshine and puppy dogs,

Jen

But over here in the land of Nut, we’re celebrating another kind of freedom. B got himself a new, same-ol’ gig. Confuzzled?

See B was a contractor for a client for the last seven years. Then in December/January some shit hit the fan and splattered allover the ceiling of life. B unfortunately was in between the shit thrower and the shit. Yeah, not good but thankfully his awesome skills allowed him to come out of the situation smelling like roses when he cleaned the shit up and used it to make things grow.

And now he’s no longer a contractor but an employee of his former client.

But that’s not the best part. No, my lovelies, the kicker is that he gets vacation. PAID VACATION. When you’re a self-employeed worker, you don’t look forward to vacation because it means not earning money. We’ve been in situations where we relied on B to bring home the bacon and then we were in times where he could take time off but we were trying to meet goals. Vacation was never a real priority for B and in the last five years, the most consecutive time off B’s taken is 3 days – when we got married.

Now, he gets three weeks off and sick days. He can go away and relax, not worried what to do with a short paycheck or figure out a way to make those hours up. We can walk on a beach and enjoy each other. There are locations where you need more than a week to explore and now those are on our agenda. Of course, there is the sick days, he can get sick and take days off to get well. In the past, he’d find ways to make up the hours as soon as he wasn’t contagious – which could lead to a relapse.

I’ll be honest, I cried when I thought about him just being able to not have that pressure anymore. Then I booked a cruise to a Hawaii. (Kidding! We’re going to Florida next month to celebrate my parents 40th Anniversary and we can stay longer than we had originally planned because of our new situation.)

There were pros and cons to the change but we’re incredibly happy with what this new gig will afford us in the near and distant future.

And Knitting. And running grown up errands like having my car serviced by five men.

Yes, at one point there were five men on my baby. I didn’t know if I needed to be ashamed or start filming the servicemen on car action and try to sell it to some perverted group on the internet. Obviously, I didn’t go with the money making route.

My car has recovered from her experience and I’ve also been poked and prodded. In the eyes. But the eyes are good. So are my teeth. And tomorrow I find out how my back is doing. Which I already know, shitty. I’ll be talking to the doctor to schedule another round of epidurals for a spinal block of glory. I loved the results from the last round, which lasted two years, and if this round is just as grand I’ll be a happy camper.

But back to the knitting, because really, that’s the intriguing (ie boring) part of my life. I’m working on a sweater for my mom – no pictures yet. And socks (in progress – toes only right now) that are in ode to my 80’s childhood, Rainbow Brite.

And here is the pile of yarn that I’ll be using to make said knee highs.

Now, for the serious subject. What would you all (five of you) think if I stopped Nutcase101 and made a new knitting blog? Nothing has been decided but maybe I’ll do something 50/50 – rant and knit or as often known in the knitting world as “Stitch and Bitch”.

It was the most relaxing moment of my life, my heart didn’t race with excitement but settled into the ease of comfort of what love really is. It’s not to say that he doesn’t make my toes curl when he kisses me, because he totally does but it was having that realization that I’d found the perfect partner in crime. And we’ve been together for over five years but man and wife, today we hit two.

Happy Anniversary B, I am so glad to be your wife. And I look forward to sitting on the couch with you holding hands for a long time.

But today was the day that I decided that walking was too hard and made this decision in front of others.

Was I committing an act of Tom Foolery? No.

Was I trying to exercise on my way to my office? No.

Was I simply doing something that I supposedly mastered approximately thirty years ago? Yes.

I wiped out in the hallway in a full blown, You Tube worthy method. No, there is no video. At least I hope not.

Oh God, I hope that security camera was there for show.

I’m sorry. You worked really hard to get the weight off of this body and the me from twenty-seven to thirty-one hasn’t been keeping up our end of the bargain. We’ve allowed greasy fast food, cakes with decadent amounts of icing and laziness to take precedence over keeping the fat off that you worked so hard to remove. You would spend an hour or two every day (even on weekends!) at the gym, focusing on cardio and the weight machines. You wouldn’t leave the elliptical machine until you had hit five miles. Now, I get winded after walking one mile.

Thankfully, I didn’t let all eighty pounds come back, just the same thirty pounds that we’ve been fighting with since I got out of grad school. We did manage to get it off for almost nine months in 2007 but then decided a sedentary lifestyle was much more conducive to doing nothing.

And the food issue, we know how wonderful fresh vegetables from the farmer markets taste – the glory of produce that was picked the day before being consumed in it’s natural state, as God intended. But now we don’t allow that type of food in the house, the Oreos needed their place of honor on the counter.

And the soda. It’s a bad addiction that’s going to be hard to break. I realized this morning that I drink almost a two liter of diet soda a day. I can only imagine what I’ve been doing to the body you had dedicated to drinking 100 ounces of water, every day, for two years straight.

But today, I would’ve made you proud. Today, I realized the harm I was doing to my body by trying to hide the food I eat from myself. My distorted thought pattern was that if I hid the food from B, I was hiding it from my body as well. Those calories weren’t going to count because I devoured it in secret where no one could witness my downfall. Also, I stopped the soda, put it down and picked up the water glass instead.

Our next step, on this side of thirty-one, I’m going to cut out sugars. Only natural sugars will prevail on a daily basis with something ‘bad’ on occasion and in moderation.

I know that these promises have been made many times to our self but today feels different. Today, I realized what you did and accomplished – how hard it was to work for that goal and I appreciate what you did, reminds me that it is possible to go back to that body. I know it’s going to be harder because we’re no longer in our early-twenties but it’s not insurmountable.

Thank you for being there twenty-three. Now, it’s time to embrace thirty-one.

Love,

Jen

It was 11:30 pm on a Saturday night. People around me were drinking, playing beer pong, making out in the corner or challenging each other to see who could do the longest keg stand. At the ripe old age of 24 and eleven months, I was too old for these sophomorish shenanigans.

The party was at someone’s rented house that I kind of knew through a friend that was in a class with a boy that was cute by my friend’s standards. Said friend wanted to an excuse to check out her classmate with full on beer goggles with the hope that he’d have his beer goggles on as well. Then who knew what would happen to them. (I think she had their wedding planned before we had entered said party door.)

I’d ended up at the party to make sure that my friend didn’t do anything stupid and because I needed to get out of the lab/library/apartment. Me, I was incredibly happy with my laptop or a book. They didn’t spill libations on me or try to pet my hair or (and honestly this happened and there are witnesses) lift me off of the dance floor in a He-Man-esque type move.

And this night wasn’t much different. There was one gentleman that had started drinking early in the evening and anyone with a pair of breasts was his target. Thankfully, I was able to tell him that the cute guy sitting on the couch was my boyfriend and that I was off the market. I scooted my way to the couch, sat down and started talking to the light-brown haired guy with a huge smile, like I had been looking for him everywhere. Thankfully, this tactic worked because my liquor lothario was on his way to his next target and I started up a really great conversation.

I had no clue who I was chatting with but we started talking, trying to figure out how we’d been conned into going to this gathering. We found out that we had a lot in common and decided that the couch was probably the safest place to stay while our ‘friends’ were off getting their party on. We chatted for two and a half hours until my friend came out of the back of the house crying because in true party fashion, her crush had a girlfriend but didn’t disclose this information until after my friend and he decided to see how much they could recall from Anatomy 101.

That meant I would be making a quick exit, needing to console my friend and said good-bye to cute guy on the couch.

My friend left whining about how glad she’d never marry her crush and I left with the contact information for my future husband.

The time on my bedside clocked glowed 4:30 and no light filtered in the window, there was no moon that night.

This was a common practice for me to be wide awake when most of the world was slumbering because I was in the second year of my double masters program and twenty-four hours a day was no where near the amount of time that I needed to get all of my work done. Since the start of August, I had been tasked with going to class, studying, go to work, running a project team of undergrads, organize and implement a recruitment campaign for my program, try to find a job and sleep (plus all of the other things that we have do to stay alive and maintain some sort of acceptable hygiene).

Sleep was the luxury that I gave up first.

There was too much to get done and I had to make sure everything was a success because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t get the grades and if I didn’t get the grades I wouldn’t get the job and if I didn’t get the job, then twenty-six years of hard work would be for nothing.

That is the thought that would run through my head every moment that I wasn’t concentrating at the task at hand. So, anytime I tried to lay down I was thinking of the what had to be completed and that I just completed or that if I dared to play hokey, that I would be so far behind my whole life would come tumbling down.

Any slumber I did get was fretful and full of images of falling in endless pits. Being awake was so much better because I thought I had some sort of control.

But on this particular morning, the synapses in my brain were firing rapidly reminding me of a giant list of tasks and deadlines that needed to be completed and met. And that’s when I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I tried studying. Sobbing. Watching TV. Sobbing. I couldn’t call anyone to share my mental state because it was so early. My mind might have been broken but my manners were still in tact. The nausea started, my chest tightened, shaking from head-to-toe, dizzy spells and a number of other symptoms of being in a state of panic.

Then I got the brilliant idea that I needed to get to campus and camp out in front of my adviser’s office door, so that when he arrived at work at 7 am he could deal with a woman in full blown mental break-down and panic attack before his first cup of coffee. I wanted to quit everything – school, life because I couldn’t handle the responsibility.

I don’t remember the drive to the campus but I do remember entering the business school building (24 hour access) and feeling a sense of relief of being on campus. But that did not last long as the panic became a hundred times worse as I realized that by leaving the graduate program that I would be letting everyone down, that my parents would be ashamed and I was going to be labeled a quitter and a failure.

And honestly, after that point, I don’t remember the thoughts that went through my head or what I did until 7 am when my professor walked around the corner and saw me there. I just know that my professor found me outside of his office curled up in a ball and he patiently spoke to me for several hours until my panic attack was over. He let me babble incoherently and took the time to listen to my fears. All of them.

He assured me of my abilities, confirmed that I was overworked and that I would be fine. That life would be okay.

And he was right.

She felt the need to never be alone, taking on a new boyfriend, a one night stand and then the series of fiances. They all loved her and I was going to be a bridesmaid many times over.

During the parade of men, I had graduated college and moved on with my life. The time she and I spent together was sparse moments when I was home. No matter what was going on, I encouraged her to better her life.

Then came the day when she called me, exasperated. She told me it was all a big misunderstanding. And that she had not been called. It wasn’t really her fault and she was going to make the next court date. The crack pipe that Child Services had found under the bed of her second child wasn’t hers, it was one of her fiance’s friend’s. And no one from the court house had told her what time her custody hearing was, it wasn’t her fault that she had lost full custody of her children. Yes, she was still going to marry him.

That was the day I walked away and couldn’t help anymore. I had always seen her as the 18 year old girl I had shared my dreams with. I thought I could save her from the bad decisions by giving her what I thought she needed. But that day, my own dream of her saving herself with my help was shattered and there was more anger at myself, as there was at her and her poor decisions. I was her enabler and she was in denial and I couldn’t support either one of us in that manner anymore.