Wow, um see how fast time flies? Seriously just occurred to me while I was watching a YouTube channel I subscribe to Mayim Bialik, I am looking at you! I thought, "Oh crap, haven't blogged in days". My first instinct was to say, "I suck", but I stopped that negative thought in it's tracks; because I really don't. Not even a little. It's amazing what negative talk we subject ourselves to mentally, it's enough already. So I am just going to make up for the last few days now and not berate myself over my forgetfulness to blog.
So I house sat and dog sat, yes I joke that I sit on houses and dogs. I'm hilarious, I remind Shawn daily of how lucky he is that I have such a great sense of what is funny, even if it is just in my head. Sometimes I can't help but say what first comes to mind and forget to filter for those who don't speak Sam. Once upon a time I had a friend I TRULY felt I could say ANYTHING and they wouldn't judge or get offended because often we were thinking the same exact thing, and we would often say "we are horrible people". Which of course we were for laughing at x y z.
Wow I am also digressing. So yeah it snowed a ton this past weekend we are up to 5 feet in town so I kind of just read and snuggled with the dogs Friday night. Saturday I shoveled my clients driveway as a courtesy and went and ran errands nothing exciting at all. I was excited for the Golden Globes because I love to see the dresses, I am not girly but I can appreciate a beautiful gown on an actress I also find beautiful. Carrie Underwood, I am NOT talking to you. Not a nice person and the dress was hideous, you looked like a vagina, a really old one.
So Sunday I got a three cheese Asiago pizza from Papa John's, like I picked it up, no delivery, hot out of the oven; this is the only kind I will eat now if at all, and it has to be, like burn your mouth hot, otherwise the cheese gets cold and gross. I watched the dogs until Monday night after I came home from work. Good times, good side hustle as Shawn calls it. Between my house/dog sitting/Uber Driving and full time job at Children and Family Services for DPHHS, I feel like I don't do much of anything else.
So we are at the 10th, it was my Uncle's birthday (Uncle Rick), and I called to make sure he hadn't gotten swept away in a flood or mudslide. He hadn't. Yesterday the eleventh we got more snow, and I just wish I could watch it snow forever. I never get tired of it. Like, ever. Today I went and saw my Health and Wellness Coach for the State and made appointments for my trainer and relationship therapist. I have no other vices except for food, I abuse it, or I avoid it. Both have left me close to death on separate occasions.
I feel optimistic.
Ok, caught up. Tomorrow, I will blog. Yes, really.
In Montana when you look at a sunbeam outside through your office window the frost looks like tiny flecks of a star. So relaxing actually, hypnotic. Also, I just want to mention something I was thinking about, smells that make people happy. In the top ten is for sure, toast. What's yours? I am absolutely obsessed with fresh garlic as well as baked yellow onion with olive oil, and a pinch of course salt and pepper and of course fresh garlic and then baked until ALMOST spreadable, just thinking about it makes my mouth water. So I was headed to the store before work, and since last February I lost touch with a dear friend who is also my neighbor just one house away but around the corner. So today as I was turning said corner, something in my heart said, to go right and go see TW, and so I followed that feeling instead of ignoring it. As I walked up to the door she had it open and ready to hug me before I even got to the porch, and I was blessed to get two more hugs before I left! What was I waiting for? Her to come see me? So much time wasted, but I can't look back, only forward. I just hate to lose touch with people who come to mean so much.
My job isn't easy, and I try to leave it there, I do; but sometimes I can't or don't and I think about how if I had a child, I would love it and never, ever let any harm I could control happen to it. Certainly not by my hand or that of someone I put in their realm you know? So many people are blessed to have a passel of children, and I just look to Heaven and ask the Lord for just one. One I can carry to term, one born healthy and where we can watch her or him grow up healthy and happy and live a long life as a family.
I don't believe God is punishing me, although I certainly would deserve it after the poor choices I made in my past when I thought I should follow my heart, when really it was a chance to make the right choice and I didn't. Live and learn. But now I wonder if I wasted my best fertile years with someone who couldn't have cared less and so now my large, beautiful (almost paid off) home will remain silent and still and organized and clean, and company ready forever.
Dust motes won't be disturbed by a diaperless baby running down the hall with Shawn and I running after it with a diaper and jammies, while we laugh hysterically at the sight of familial chaos.
Don't take one moment for granted dear reader, if you are lucky enough to have children or family, you'll miss them when their gone when your friends become your family because everyone in your family has passed on.
Today was all about work and wrapping up the holiday weekend of reports. Tonight a friend is coming over and we will all play board games and have some dinner. Friday I start my dog/house sitting and Saturday we have game night at our friends house and Sunday Shawn starts back for this season of hockey. Tons of snow on the ground and more on the way and winter just officially kicked off here in Montana.
Back to work today and am here until 7 as usual. Shawn will pick up a card for Uncle Rick and my sister asked me to make her a pie and send it to her. Glad tomorrow is Wednesday, as I am looking forward to the weekend because I am pet-house sitting for a new client until Monday night.
Sometimes what we want isn't always what we need, and sometimes what we need is something we didn't even know we wanted.
R & R and ran a few errands, nothing too exciting. Keeley came over and hung out before heading back to school this Saturday. Back to work tomorrow after a three day weekend.
So we left for Vegas on the 15th of November a Tuesday and stayed in Utah, just past Salt Lake for the night, and got up super early and made it to Vegas early on Wednesday in time to meet Shawn's dad and step-mom and aunt who had flown from Texas to Vegas that morning at the Grand hotel where I met them for the first time. We stayed in Vegas until Friday morning when I drove all of us to Tempe, Arizona where the Iron Man was being held on Sunday. Shawn finished in record time and his folks flew out Tuesday the 22nd and we drove back to Vegas and would leave Saturday and get home late that night in time to rest Sunday and be back at work on the 28th.
So that was just the logistics now for the details. I enjoyed the drive from Helena, MT to Vegas as I missed it last time due to needing to be on my phone with my grandmothers doctors last year. I like the Grand hotel, it's nice but the casino is very small, or so I am told by Shawn and his family. I don't casino. The restaurant in the hotel was so good I could've eaten there for every meal but his family likes variety so we ventured out and it was cool. We walked to a casino and it took us past the Fremont, and it was GROSS. No one wears clothes it seems, and I am not sure if it was performance art or if they were trying to make a statement, but I saw bits and pieces and wobbly bits that cannot be unseen, poor Shawn's family were like "we won't be back, it's just changed too much". I talked Shawn and his dad into going to take the tour of the Hoover Dam where you pay $40 a person and get a guided tour into the bowels of the dam, and it was incredible and suggest everyone do it once in their life, it was awesome. We saw some sheep, or "sheeps" if your Sam and you misspeak; on our way back to the hotel, it was really neat.
Driving us into Phoenix was slightly painful. I miss mom you guys so bad I can't think of her without crying. I miss my family, they keep dying, always with the dying, it's just too much with the death. I keep reaching for the phone to make calls to people who are never going to answer. Don't delete voicemails folks, that is my tip of the year, you will give just about anything to hear their voices just once more. Trust me on this one. While we were there I took Shawn by my old apartment where my mom and I lived together, best times of my life with her, and when we lived there it was brand new and we were the first to live there, now it is ghetto, and it just made me hurt. You can never go home again folks, just like Inola when I went to settle her estate. I couldn't bare to go any of our properties because it was all gone, like it never was. That's a place I know too well now, the Neverwas, I will write a autobiography and title it Neverwas.
I took the family out to the Superstition mountains and really showed them the best parts of the Phoenix area. It was nice. Shawn killed it at his fourth Iron Man, 12 hours, best time yet and Shawn took me to the finish line at midnight which is the cut off time to cheer on those last few beasts who were able to stay in the race to the very end. Thing is about Iron Man is take the swim for example, it's the first heat, and if you don't finish in a set time you're disqualified, period. No matter where you flew in from or drove in from or how much you spent in training and equipment, if you don't, you don't and you get out of the water (and this is the part I went and did during the race) you are disoriented and everyone is cheering for you not because you finished in time but because you finished on your own steam and didn't get on one of the life boats and quit, so you are hauling ass to get out of your wet suit and on to the bike 112 miles and a lady has to come and tell you, "I'm sorry, but your race is over". I cried and cried every time someone climbed out of that nasty Tempe Town Lake Lagoon, thinking they were moving on, well this happens, for the bike and the run, someone comes and pulls you of the course if they do the math and you aren't far enough ahead in the course. Shawn says some people still come in after midnight but that we need to leave so they can without embarrassment and without the, sorry it is 12:01 you are NOT an Iron Man, because that's what they say after every single person crosses the finish line, they say "Shawn Pennartz you ARE an Iron Man, or "Jane Doe you ARE an Iron Man", yes, women are Iron Men also.
Shawn finished at 7 so we came back 5 hours later to see the folks coming in just under the wire. It was cool. I cried. Again.
So we saw Shawn's family off to Texas Tuesday and headed back to redo Vegas since I wasn't exactly "present" the previous year, but we had a 5 hour drive ahead of us where; as previously agreed upon on Monday, 2/29/16 when we got engaged we would pick our wedding date after Iron Man because training is pretty intense. So we decided after talking to his folks and agreeing to have our reception in Texas and let them host it; and that 5 hour drive that we will go to Ireland November 3rd and fly into Dublin and rent a car at the airport and go on our own self driven tour around the whole island and take a ferry from Ireland to Scotland and tour some distilleries and get married in Ireland at a chapel on an estate that was established back in 1881 and get our rings in Galway, where claddagh rings were invented and write our own vows, Shawn's idea if you can believe it; and then return 11/25 and factor in jet lag and go back to work 11/28 and our jobs already approved the time off, gotta love working for the state!
So in Vegas we went to see the Titanic exhibit and that was neat, so we will go see the actual Titanic birthplace in Ireland while we are there. I used Shawn's points and went to the spa and got a 90 minute massage and another 90 minute reflexology it was Heaven. I also used his points to go and watch the Chippendales and it was a funny show, yes, funny. I mean Shawn's is as ripped as those strippers so that wasn't a big thrill but the acts were funny and I had a good time, even met a nice gay boy to sit and watch with. Shawn and I went to see a showgirl show, and it was awful, again with the gross, and given that the tickets are so expensive you'd think you would see something hot, nope. There were MAYBE 23 people in the whole place, it was awkward. So we crossed a few things off our bucket lists so you can say, "been there, done that".
All in all, good visit and mini-vacation. Always good to come home though.
I miss you and think about you every day and hope you and the kids are well.
