Totally stressing

I am sooo freaking stressed out. I have a meeting on Friday with my biggest account and I am totally scared out of my mind. Their contract is up for renewal at the end of this month and although they love the food and service they are receiving, their budget is super tight and may not allow for us to continue with them next year.

If we lose this account I have no idea what will happen to me. Just the one account easily makes up 75% of my revenue during the regular school year, so without them, I may not have enough going on to stay employed. All 3 of my bosses have told me not to worry, but I am just so on edge. I can't focus on anything, my google reader has like 40 unread items. This all really hit me last night and poor Nathan had to deal with me tossing and turning all night. He finally convinced me to take my in case of emergency muscle relaxor so that I could get some sleep.

I want to apply for some jobs just in case, but I am having a really difficult time focusing on wrting cover letters and tweaking my resume. Plus, I feel like I am going to throw up with all my nerves.

Eek, two more days until my fate is decided.....

My emotional roller coaster

I have actual sat down to blog about 4 times in the last five days, but everytime I do it is all work, work, work. Work has freaking consumed me yet again. This week should have been great, but more theft occurred and a super ugly termination that directly affects me.

I was proud though, because I feel like I really held myself together. I used to be not be able to handle stress at all. I would totally freak out, cry, puke, the works. And although this week I came close to those points I never really hit them full blast.

However, it has still been a stressful few weeks and I had never looked more forward to a weekend. Especially last night because Nathan and I were just going to run a quick couple errands and then watch a movie. We had both been wanting to see "Feast of Love" with Morgan Freeman and it had just been sitting at our house for over a week waiting to be watched.

What a bad idea. That movie was an emotional roller coaster and that was all it took for me to really let out my emotions. I only occasionally cry while watching movies, but last night I became almost hysterical. The roller coaster of love, death, and a cute English Setter just got to me and I just let it all out. I had one of those cries that makes your throat hurt and get all dry.

I guess in some ways I needed to do that and at least I did it at home and not at work. I just wish I could handle stress in a better way. I have certainly made a lot of improvement, but I am still not at an acceptable level of stress handling. I am sure this will be acquired over time, but I wish it would come quickly.

One big positive I can say is that the past few weeks of work have shown me that I have an amazing support system. It has been great to come home and see positive comments from bloggers. In addition, even though I have mentioned dozens of times that Boss #1 is awesome, the past few weeks have really made me appreciate him and the other couple star employees that have been ready to help me with whatever I need. Thank GOD for good people.

I have never loved grass so much

After a not so great week, I can tell you one thing that is fabulous...we are actually starting to see grass where we put in the drain tile. THANK GOD! I wonder if anyone has ever had a nervous break down due to the condition of their yard, because I think I was coming close.

However, we aren't in the clear yet....a couple places don't even have the little gift of the beginnings of the grass, but we bought another bag of seed and plan on spreading it until I have a freaking forest in the bare spots.

Coming up in next blog......the story of our new (hopefully) pimptastic closet.

Crazy ass day

Today was the craziest and maybe worst day of my work life. I am not going to go into details because you never know who is reading......but I am exhausted.

On top of all that, we no longer ghetto in our yard, we are SUPER ghetto. Tuesday we realized we were the only people on the block that had yet to mow their grass. So Nathan pulls out the mower yesterday and gets the front yard complete. It looked so much better! He than starts to do a path to the backyard and oh, oh....the mower dies.

We knew the thing was on it's last leg, but now our front yard is done and the yard going to the back looks super goofy with part of the lawn complete. Even with that problem I still think I am going to try to talk Nathan out of mowing and let him pamper me since I had such a bad day.

I'm alright, I just need to vent to someone.....

an open letter

I am stealing this idea from STLwed.....an open letter:

Dear blog readers that comment,
I really appreciate your concern about my crappy work situation. This week it appears the situation is resolved for at least the time being and I don't have to fear about losing my job.

Dear team member,
If you don't think I am smart enough to realize that you stir up shit with other team members, then you are underestimating me. Please discontinue this behavior. It will not help you in the long run.

Dear Boss #1,
I did mean it when I told you that you could use me as an excuse to your semi-crabby mood. I think it would be believable that my new "diet" is making me cranky and that new cranky attitude is rubbing off on you.

Dear Boss #2,
I may kill fellow manager that you supervise and I just wanted to let you that upfront.

Dear fellow manager just mentioned,
You have been making my job VERY difficult. I am now going to have clean up a mess that YOU made and I don't appreciate it. Just because you don't give a damn about following procedure doesn't mean you have to screw over those of us that do.

Dear Weather,
For the love of God, please stop all this rain! You are making yard work impossible.

Dear Yard,
You are ghetto, but just because you have accepted defeat doesn't mean I have to. Start regrowing the grass already!

Dear Husband's company,
I love having my husband on day shift. We are able to accomplish so much more instead of trying to cram in all projects and errands on the weekend. Please do not all of a sudden schedule a training group at night and ruin my happiness.

Dear Husband,
I love seeing you during the evenings. I love the fact that you agreed to try and be healthier by going on this meal plan. Thank you for driving my drunk ass home on Saturday night and not complaining about it.

Dear Jenn and Brian,
I will never again say in your presence, "I will drink, but I can't drink too much because I don't want to be hungover tomorrow." Because obviously this was the kiss of death. I will also never ask you to step foot in that bar again, but I can't promise I won't ever try to make you "sing" karaoke again, because that is just too much fun.

Dear stomach,
I get you are starving, get over it. The first week is going to be the worst.

Stress and a vow

Yesterday was rough for me. I got to work and found out that 5 of my vending machines had been broken into and all their currency had been taken.

When this occurs I have to switch into high gear. Getting product out of the machines and securing them is priority as well as getting them off campus as quickly as possible. I also have to make about a dozen phone calls to people that get highly irritated when this happens.

As you can see, I have dealt with this before. And since it is always the same campus now the college is thinking about getting rid of those machines completely, which would totally suck for me considering it is the campus that does the most sales.

Onto the next stress...my dad called me. Anytime this happens I know something is up. My dad and I have a WONDERFUL relationship but we are before very far from being phone people. With the exception of one person I can talk to, I hate, hate, hate talking on the phone to anyone. But back to my dad....he informed me very nicely that I hadn't returned a few of my mother's phone calls. I've had a lot going on between my yard, town flooding, hospital visit, Easter and vending break-ins and I guess I just hadn't noticed that well, yes, maybe I hadn't returned 2 or 3 of my mother's calls in the past couple of weeks. Plus we skipped their place this Easter to see Nathan's family, which wasn't a big deal but still resulted in less contact with my mom.

Apparently she was worried. VERY worried. She thought something was terribly wrong like Nathan and I were getting a divorce, we were behind on our mortgage, I was going through a deep depression, etc. So after convincing my Dad I was fine, we agreed I would get off the phone right away and phone my Mom and just leave out the part that he called me. Thank goodness my Dad can help clue me back into reality.

So that's my stress. Wine and sleep therapy is helping.

This is my vow: I will post more cooking related stuff on this blog. In the beginning I told some readers outside of blog world that I would do this and I have really been lacking. Plus, eating is in the freaking title! So I will make a strong effort to post a recipe or technique or cooking something every week. Plus, I will try and touch the "drinking" part too besides just talking about my wine consumption and drunk debauchery.

Oh the joys!

Well, after a couple stressful hours of digging we managed to get our french drain project under control and about 90% complete. I say 90 because we still need to throw a little more dirt on top of the drain pipes and clean up the hellish muddy mess. Oh, and plant grass seed, but that seems pretty minor. Of course it just had to rain today and make doing anything to complete the project impossible.

My neck felt pretty good so I did some shoveling, but Nathan ran the "Trencher". We did have a friend come over for about 10 minutes to help us load the mother of a thing back into the truck, but Nathan and I did the rest.

Oh, ummm, in case you are wondering the purpose of this project (maybe I should have included this earlier) we have a problem with drainage in our backyard. Basicly, the back yard slopes to the house so water pools next to the house. Big puddles next to house = mud = damp crawl space = bad stuff. So we saved ourselves about $800 and installed our own drain tile.

I could go into more detail but I think it is pretty boring so that is the cliff notes version. If anyone needs to do this or think they might let me know and I can email you step by step stuff.

Here are some pictures of the project. I don't have any good "before" shots because the cell phone camera is crappy as usual:

I have no idea what Nathan is doing, but I love this last pic because of cute Roxie in the window.

This medicine is messing with me

I don't know what has come over me this week...I am acting not normal and I can't figure it out except maybe it is the muscle relaxers doing something funky. I would think it would be me being really relaxed and lazy, but it isn't I have been a little sleepy, but other than that I am not acting like I probably should be acting.

Strange action #1: I told Nathan I wanted to do some touch up painting this weekend and repaint the french doors going outside. I HATE PAINTING, seriously. So I have no idea why I want to touch up some spots of paint on the ceiling that have been there for 10 months.

Strange action #2: I decided I wanted to get laundry over with tonight. I never do laundry on my own, I always do it with Nathan so I can push most of the work off on him.

Strange action #3: Along with laundry I decided I had to clean (yes, on a Friday night). And not just do dishes and vaccum, I scrubbed scuff marks off doors and attempted to get Roxie nail scratches off walls.

I don't know what is going on with me but these behaviors are not typical. Maybe I need to research the drug a little and see if a side effect is "compulsion to clean and do small house projects". Crazy....

Update on my neck

Backstory:
My neck was super sore on Monday for no apparent reason. I do a decent amount of heavy lifting at work, but I rarely pull muscles or do anything to aggravate my body.

I woke up at about 2 am Tuesday in terrible pain. Nathan was still up on the computer and yelled for him. I couldn't believe how much pain I was in. I was actually nauseous from it. I took Ibuprofen and he lathered me up with Icy Hot. At 4:15 I was better, but not much. I couldn't even brush my own hair without sharp shooting pain.

I got dressed and Nathan and I decided that the best thing was for him to drive me to work because I HAD to go and unlock and do a couple things. At 6:30 am when my boss walked in, he could immediately tell something was wrong. I just said, "It's my neck, I have to go to the hospital." Two minutes later I was walking tilted head to the car.

The Urgent care doctor thinks I probably pulled a muscle and it got aggravated with started causing spasms. She gave me muscle relaxers, which take away about 90% of the pain and I can actually turn my head. It hurts today, but I went into work and toughed it out because missing two days in a row really puts me behind and we had a huge catered event today.

I am kind of disappointed in the muscle relaxers. I've never had take them and I thought that would make me feel loose and groovy. Darn.

update on poo flying

Supposedly our main drain/sewer line is finally fixed. It only took three weeks and about 635 dollars. For those three weeks we were able to run everything water related except the washer, because it let out to much water at once.

The cost breakdown:
$51.70 rental cost from Home Depot as an attempt to snake the drain ourselves
$134.00 first attempt by professional to snake it, but could only get it partially done because of only having access to the floor drain
$271.15 cost of having a professional bring a specialized camera out to try and find out if our entire line needed to be fixed do to it collapsing. This is after a 10% discount.
$119 the second trip out with the camera because Nathan didn't get a copy of the tape to give to the City also discounted.
$60 ish the cost to snake from the outside access that was found the 2nd time the camera went through.

So for those of you that haven't had the experience of going through major plumbing problems here is some good advice:
1. Find out if you have outside access to your main plumbing/sewer line. If we would have found this right away we could have probably saved about $400.
2. Three magic words: Sewer Lateral Program. If our pipes had been collapsed (which it didn't, we had roots) underground in the yard, this program would have paid for most if not all of the cost of digging up our entire yard and replacement. Our municipal (and most in STL) have this program and it is kick ass.
3. Make sure your floor drains are covered.
4. Do maintenance on your pipes by running a snake through every two years or so. You can rent one (from Home Depot) and do it yourself fairly easily if you have the outside access.

No I am not happy about dropping all the money we did, but we definitely learned a lot about our plumbing system. One of the joys of being a homeowner I suppose.

When is enough enough?

Backstory:

I had a friend, lets call him Guy, who I was inseparable with in high school. We did everything together and did it well. Guy and I were co-editors-in-chief of the school newspaper, president and vice president of several different clubs, and he directed the plays and musicals that I starred in. While we both had a lot of different friends and would always hang out with others, we were still very close. I would have done anything for Guy. But Guy being a guy, he didn't always express to me that he would do anything for me and some of my friends thought he abused our friendship by taking advantage of me. I never really felt this way, but everyone is entitiled to their own opinons.



We went our separate ways in college, but still managed to talk pretty frequently and get together when we could. When I got engaged Guy was so very happy for me. He didn't make it to the wedding because he had joined the military, but their didn't seem to be a whole lot he could do about that.



Over the summer Guy called me because he was in town and said he really wanted me to join him at a friend's Bday celebration. I reluctantly agreed just because I was never really friends with this friend of Guy's or any of the people that would be at the party. Guy was late to the party so I was left to make awkward conversation with the others. He finally showed up with another friend who was driving him around because he was drunk out of his mind and still drinking. Plus he was smoking like a chimney.

I honestly don't hold anything aganist anyone that smokes or drinks if they do it in a respectiful (and safe!) manner, but he definately wasn't. In addition, he was always that person that lectured others for smoking and drinking so it was very hypocritical of him doing all that.

Guy then did something stupid. He hit his friend in the head in a semi-joking manner. Well, Guy's friend said it hurt him and they stayed mad at each other the rest of the night. As we moved the party to a local restaurant to get a late meal, Guy stayed outside mostly refusing to come in until his friend apoligized to him. Basicly, Guy was being a huge, drama filled asshole. I said good-bye to him that night and as I went home I was really angry at Guy for being so disrespectful. I don't think it is right to cause uneccessary drama with a good friend and I although I can certainly drink my fair share too, doing it to the point of being obnixous and dangerous is just not ok in my book. After that I decided that maybe Guy and I were a little too different now and I wasn't going to call him anymore.

Fast forward to this weekend. I am at a restaurant in my hometown and Guy's brother happens to be in a large group of people I was eating dinner with. I over hear him say that Guy is home from the military (sounds like permanently) and is going to be staying in the area for awhile.

So now I am perplexed. After our last time spent together with him being such an asshole I didn't really want to see him. But on the other hand I do. He was a good friend for so long and what happened with him friend really didn't have anything to do with me, other than me just observing it and not agreeing with the way he was treating his friend.

In the back of my mind I really want to see him, but why does part of me think that I may just get hurt trying to be his friend again? And do I really want to associate with someone that makes bad decision in regards to drinking?

So when is enough enough? When do you stop investing in a friendship and pull the plug? Any advice on the matter is encouraged.

Oh, and thanks for reading this MEGA HUGE post. :)