Luxury Camping

My Dad figured out how to manually light the pilot light on the gas water heater, so now our house has warm running water, in addition to the flushing toilets and gas stove that we had before. Even without power, the hot shower and the bowl of oatmeal that I ate this morning make me feel like I'm at a really nice camp site. The cooler filled with ice, soda, milk, cheese, and our leftovers from any meal that we make only heightens that feeling. My Mom keeps wondering if we should be spraying bug spray more liberally, given the amount of standing water still in the immediate area. I keep wondering if we should be doing more hiking and maybe making S'mores at night.

I'm back at work this morning. There is power and internet here, although a strange lack of employees. I work in East Houston, but a lot of the employees live south, closer to Galveston. I'm hoping that their houses or cars weren't damaged in the storm. For me, the bad part about having to drive 20 miles each direction is that I'm going to need gas fairly quickly. There are limited gas stations that are open and all of them boast long lines of cranky car owners.

It's all to be expected, though. The local city government tried to keep people away from their homes as long as possible. The "All Clear" message hasn't gone out yet and as of the last time I checked, only 37% of Houston has power. Galveston is still completely underwater, yet there is a primal urge to return and survey where you have staked all your hopes and dreams.

The national (and now even the local) media has come down very, very hard on the people that chose to not evacuate, even after the mandatory evacuation order was issued two days before the storm. I understand why they didn't leave, though. People are wary of the media since it's wrong so much of the time. We evacuated for Hurricane Rita and at the last moment the storm veered east and slammed into Beaumont, TX. Even for this storm, they had predicted a 20 foot surge into Galveston. The highest storm surge was recorded at 13 ft. So imagine you live on the island and your house is on 17 foot stilts. Would you evacuate, knowing that so very often the media is wrong? Yes, there both the mayor and the governor called for an evacuation of all coastal areas, particularly Galveston island. Yes, about 40% of the island's inhabitants either couldn't afford to evacuate, didn't want to live in a shelter, physically couldn't evacuate, or just simply chose not to. But let's not call these people "knuckleheads". I'm talking to you Governor Perry.

More people died on the freeways from dehydration and car accidents during the evacuation for Hurricane Rita in 2005 than died from damage caused by the storm. It's understandable why people would chose not to participate in another evacuation. Unless you've been in a car for 40 hours in 100 degree heat with no air conditioner, sleeping on the side of the road, and forced to sit in a gas line for hours on end, perhaps you can keep your judgements to yourself. I wish the search and rescue teams the best of luck. They have done an outstanding job rescuing more than 2,000 people. I'd also like to congratulate the 60,000 people that didn't need rescuing after choosing not to evacuate.

Hurricane Ike

Nothing like a mandatory evacuation to stop regularly scheduled blogging. My parents, Zac, I, and two cats evacuated on Thursday, September 11th, to San Antonio, TX. What should have been a three-hour drive on I-10 took about seven hours. I learned an interesting lesson during that time: it's not actually using the computer that hurts my shoulder and back, it's sitting hunched over for a couple of hours at a time.

We were lucky to find one of the last hotel rooms in San Antonio. Unfortunately, the hotel didn't allow any animals, regardless of the circumstances. Even begging didn't help. There was a firm "no pet" policy that a harried night manager was not going to bend for a car load of hurricane evacuees with very old cats. The cats stayed in a kennel for four days, which probably had more room than three adults and a toddler had in a hotel room with two full-size beds. It's not that I don't love my family. I do. I just love them more when I we have doors that can be shut between us.

Zac has weathered the evacuation remarkably well. He got to sleep next to his Mom for four nights. I can honestly say that I've haven't cuddled that much, for consecutive nights, in over five years. It wasn't enough to sleep near me, or even have parts of his body on me. No, he wanted to meld our bodies together. He had his arm wrapped around my neck and his feet on the small of my back. At one point, he ended up perpendicular to me and kicked me in the chin repeatedly, waking me up as close to cursing as I could get while sleeping next to my parents and supposedly asleep first born.

Not that I can complain much. The drive back took only about four hours. Our house avoided significant damage. My Dad has been helping the neighbors rebuild their fences and find tarps to cover the patches of their roofs. We lost all of the food in our refrigerator and freezer. The power is still off, although we have running water. The lack of power has been giving me a certain amount of flashbacks to Mongolia, but I'm making it through. I'm supposed to be back at work on Wednesday, provided work has power.

Until then, I'll be huddled around a portable 2" tv player, waiting to hear news about when power might be restored and trying, for the eighth time, to explain the concept of electricity to a three year-old that just wants to watch Dora and doesn't understand why the adults are holding out on him.

Endurance

Somewhere between 6:45pm and 7:00pm last night, I hit the wall. My eyes could barely stay open and I was pretty sure that any stemware that stood between me and a chair would be broken on my way down off the step ladder. Normally, I wouldn't be around large quantities of fragile items, but yesterday was my second day at my second job.

Getting a second job sounded like a good idea. I would just work a couple of extra hours around the holiday to pay for unexpected expenses (like a $450 a/c repair on a car that has already had its a/c system repaired three separate times). I also wanted to pay down debt that has been mounting up lately (see unexpected car repairs and root canals). With those lofty goals, I reapplied at a Pier 1 store close to where my parents live. I worked at a Pier 1 store in New Hampshire. Apparently it is a disastrous combination to mix hormonal women and household decor: no less than five of us got pregnant within four months. I found out that I was pregnant with Zac within weeks of another associate finding out that she was pregnant with twins. It was baby mania accented with the smell of lavender room mist spray.

Fast forward four years and I'm back working at Pier 1. Oddly enough, inflation has had the opposite effect on salaries for sales associates. I'm told that the phrase, "cost of living" doesn't really exist in Texas. It's more for Yankees and their delicate sensibilities than for people living extremely close to large forces of nature, like category 3 hurricanes. You just have to suck it up and put your plywood purchases on a credit card down here.

Anyways, I've worked a lot of long hours at my primary job this past year. One of the reasons that I got a second job was because I knew that it would force me to balance out my life. I couldn't work 12-15 hours at the job because I would have to leave and work 4 hours at another job.

Something happened along the way, though. Somehow I forgot about the wall that long-distance runners hit when their glucose levels dip too low and they feel like they want to lay down and cry. I hit the wall. I couldn't wait until 10pm to eat. I felt like an out-of-shape runner trying to do a 10k. I don't have the same endurance that I did when I worked two jobs in New Hampshire. I require more sleep now and certainly more daily calories than before. While eyeing the red tile under a breakfast table for a cozy spot to lay my head, I thought, "I need to start training for this. I need protein snacks and shot of glucose every 3-4 hours. I need more water and maybe Gatorade. Maybe then I'll be able to make it until 10pm without breaking three wine glasses and a ceramic vase."

I Heart Erica

Look! Twin Diet Coke bottles. It's like we were meant to be...

Since my last post was exclusively devoted to my reunion (and no, Brian doesn't look identical to the way he did in high school. He had blond hair then and fewer wrinkles (and I mean that in the best way possible because he has laugh lines around his eyes and mouth now, which I think look great)), I didn't post much about my mini-reunion with Erica.

Erica and I met sometime between the ages of 11 and 12 (we think). We met at one of the Methodist church dances that were organized monthly at different churches in the Western Washington area. She lived about two hours north from where I lived, but after our first meeting, we felt drawn to each other. I remembered asking for her address so we could communicate in-between dances. At that same dance, I had my first kiss with a boy that went to Erica's church. I won't post his full name here to avoid a repetition of past run-ins with google, but nevertheless, when Erica said his name I remembered him immediately.

We communicated through letters for a year or so and then lost touch with each other. Around Christmas time this year, I got a message from her on myspace. She said she woke up one day and remembered my last name, which hasn't changed through the years, as her's had. She typed my full name into myspace and only had one hit - my page. After a coincidence like that, she knew that she wanted to contact me and reconnect.

When I got the first message from her, I think I almost fell off the sofa. Memories of church dances, slow songs, first kisses, and letters came flooding back to me. It's not that I had forgotten about her, it was just that she was pushed into a recess in my mind. What's even more amazing than her finding me online has been the friendship that has developed (or redeveloped as it were).

Her unconditional love has redefined me as a person. When I say that I never knew people could treat each other this way, I mean that in both the negative and the positive sense. I've been hurt so badly this year by cruel, insensitive people, yet they've been overshadowed by these brilliant points of light. She's one of those points.


Why yes, I was a little drunk and more than a little tired in the above picture. At least Erica is looking fabulous. I love this picture of her and her husband, Rodney, below. Rod waited to meet me in person before asking if he could "friend" me on myspace. For the record, I said yes to his request.

Anyone recognize what's in the background of that photo?

Deep, Cleansing Breath

I need to take several deep, cleansing breaths in order to post the photos from my reunion. Photos from the reunion can also be given the title: "Ways to turn memories from an event into self-loathing, with one easy flash" I've mentioned several times on here that I lost 25 lbs over the course of the past year. Going from what I thought was severely overweight to pleasantly rotund. I mean, I dated at both weights and couldn't see any noticeable differences. I still don't look at myself naked after getting out of the shower and I still have to have the lights turned off before, during, and after any form of physical intimacy. That much hasn't changed. Nonetheless, I have photographic evidence that I have a long ways to go in my struggle against the bulge. I'm built like a brick.

The day of the reunion started out with Erica and I driving from norther WA down to Auburn. In theory, it's a 90 mile drive that should have taken us an hour and a half. In reality, Seattle traffic is the only place worse than Houston. A full three-and-a-half hours later we were stumbling from the car going, "Is this really Auburn. I thought it was just a mystical land of fairies, little leprechauns, and mascots named after a popular brand of condoms. I wasn't sure it even really existed."

After a brief rest in the hotel, Erica and I started getting ready for my reunion. I was about eighteen times more nervous than she was, of course, and pretty much felt like I was going to vomit the whole time.
Applying eye liner while feeling like you might get sick to your stomach is a skill that I picked up while pregnant, driving down the freeway, trying to make it to a lunch shift on-time. Clearly, it's a skill that continues to serve me well. Erica snapped this shot as I was getting ready to head out the door. I think she was grabbing her chap stick and the camera that would forever immortalize my downfall as a fat drunkard.

The choice of dress for the evening was almost exclusively chosen because it covered both my arms and my legs. A burlap sack would have done as nicely, but probably would have been less comfortable against my armor-wielding undergarments. But, I'm avoiding the inevitable, let's introduce the cast of major players at my high school 10-year reunion.

In a coming blog post, I'll have to show you the picture of the last time my ex-boyfriend, Brian, and I saw each other. We were in Hawaii and I was almost six months pregnant. I teased him mercilessly at the reunion because he didn't recognize me in Oahu. I'm pretty sure he recognized me this time before I threw myself onto him and gave him a big hug. He was late coming into the reunion, so I had resigned myself to not seeing him. Yet, he suddenly appeared, and it almost felt like we were back in 10th grade math class again, even though he's married to a wonderful woman and I'm a a single Mom to a kid that dumped yogurt on my pillow this morning. All that aside, it was great to see him. As I said, I think I possibly jumped on him in excitement.

Then there was Sean. Sean and I met our 7th grade year in Honors Reading and Language Arts class. He was a staple of my junior high and high school years. Seeing him at the reunion, so clearly having such a good time, convinced me to let go of my occasionally uptight demeanor and just go a little wild. I'm not sure either one of us meant to get as wild as we did, however.

I blame Jared, the guy on the far left-hand side for buying all three of us a shot of tequila with a wedge of lime. It makes me a little sick to my stomach just thinking about it. Yes, I was one of "those people" that goes to a reunion and gets drunk. I'm also one of "those type of people" that gets a little crazy when I'm not caring for a toddler or rear-ending school buses. I have my priorities.

From left to right, the men in this photo are Jared, Sean, Scott, Jake, and Quang. Jake was one of my first boyfriend in the seventh grade. I think we lasted all of two weeks. His wife is quite possibly a saint for going to his reunion 8 months pregnant and letting me rub her stomach while sputtering, "Did Jake tell you that he was my first boyfriend?" and trying not to spill Bud Light on her shoes (and they were very nice shoes. Did I mention that she's possibly saint-worthy? There were a number of pregnant women there that seemed to fit that category. Aside - where the hell did all those pregnant women come from? Holy moly!!)

You can tell it's getting later in the evening. I'm openly sporting my beer bottle in the photos and there are fewer and fewer people in the chairs behind us.

Kalae, the woman on the left, turned into a supermodel at some point following high school and Rachael is looking amazing (in general), but also for having a two month-old son. She mentioned the fact that she was feeding and didn't get to enjoy as many beverages as the rest of the crowd seemed to be enjoying. Poor woman.

After the reunion, we went to a house party where there were several more alumni that didn't want to pay the cost to go the actual event. I have to mention Derek S., and what he said to me when I showed up at his house on Friday evening. He said, 'B...I've been waiting for you. You don't know how many conversations you've been a part of since you've been gone. I've been waiting for you and now you are here." Ok, granted, Derek might have been a little high (he would have had to be to not punch me in the face after singing the chorus of "In the Navy" to him twenty times after he told me he joined the Navy and went around the world for five years.)

Since Erica went back to the hotel, I don't have any pictures (she was the designated photographer for the evening) from the house party. What I do have is the embarrassing memory of having Brian drive Sean, Darin, and I back to the hotel in Auburn. Brian didn't have more than one beer the entire evening, so in addition to being the girl that didn't drink in high school that got sloshed at her reunion, I'm also the drunk ex-girlfriend that possibly said something along the lines of, "She didn't even know that I dated women until my plane landed in Seattle" and forced Brian to console me by telling me to remain true to myself. I nodded and wobbled into the hotel with his words.

Erica decided to celebrate by catching me in the act of returning to the hotel at 3am, after I had managed to change into my pajamas:

I'm so embarrassed at the fact that she's taking my pictures that I'm trying to cover my face (not actually stop myself from getting sick, which is the alternate interpretation of this picture).

When an evening ends like this, you know you've had a good time. I'm glad I went, self-deprecating humor and potential blood-alcohol poisoning and all. I only embarrassed myself a handful, or ten, times and at least I have the luxury of living over 2,000 miles away from anyone that might try to tease me about what happened. It was a good reunion.

I'm Doing What?

I'm going to my ten-year high school reunion on Friday, August 22nd. It's a little bit shocking still to me, even though I have had the plane reservations for a month now and just bought the incredibly overpriced event tickets for myself and a guest. I'm staying with my friend Erica in Western WA, not particularly close to where I grew up and went to high school. Actually, it's far enough away that we got a hotel room for the night in the town where the reunion is being hosted.

At Erica's request, I looked for some old pictures of myself. The only problem is that I had packed everything in boxes in preparation for my August 1st move that never happened. Since my new move date is September 21st, I just decided to leave everything packed because, really, how often do you need to look at ten year-old photos of yourself? Well, the answer is: not very often unless you have a high school reunion coming up and someone wants to see what you actually looked like in high school. THEN and only then, will you need photographic evidence that you look like a different version of yourself than you do now.

When I look at the photo above I see a young woman at the ripe age of 17. She's almost shining with possibility and promise. She didn't know what was ahead of her, all she knew was that something - anything had to be better than what was behind her. If someone had told her on her graduation day that she'd be pregnant in six years and a single Mom within seven, she would have laughed and maybe squinted her eyes a bit with the secret knowledge that she always knew her life wouldn't turn out exactly the way she thought it would. She knew that much, even if she had faith in the world to always protect and comfort her.

In high school, I was the girl that used too many big words and read too much. I didn't fit in with the athletes, the party crowd, the super smart kids, or the drama kids. I didn't have many friends and I was cruel to some of the ones that I had for petty reasons. I joined every single club and after school activity with the hopes of boosting my resume enough to get a scholarship to an out-of-state college. I was so busy and so involved with my boyfriend that I never really had the time for friends.

In preparation for my reunion, I've had to go through 12-step processes with several of my fellow classmates. "I'm sorry I was needlessly cruel to you," I'd begin, "I'd like to apologize for my behavior, even though I know it's been so long and that there is really nothing I can say or do to make it better. I'm sorry if I hurt you." Paused silence as I listened to their reply. "No, I'm not in AA. Why do you ask?" The conversations only got better from there. They were humbling, to say the least.

With my conscious as clear as it can be, I feel ready to board the plane on Thursday and head back to the place where I grew up. I can't call it "home" because it was only ever home until I turned 17. My parents moved from the Seattle-area to Houston when I was studying at Oxford during my junior year of college. I manage to go back to Seattle once every couple of years to see my extended family. This time, I hope to see some friends that I've lost touch with and maybe make some new acquaintances. Although I'm an older, more cynical and heavier version of myself now, I have a freer heart and a kinder spirit. I know that I don't have to fight for my place in the world and I'd like to be able to project that somehow.

How I present myself now can't be much worse than I how I presented myself in high school. Some people from those days will remember me looking like this:

"No invader beats a RAIDER. We'll go down in history!"

Anything has to be better than my body dressed in a colonial outfit, brandishing a sword to fight the marauding Native American warriors away from the Western outposts, with a giant head and felt hat. I actually made a kid cry once when I waved at him. I'm not sure he gathered all the racial and socio-economic problems latent in having a high school mascot called the Raiders in the same town where all of the junior high schools are named after Native American tribes. If he had, we both might have started crying. To that little boy, I was just a scary giant head with bushy eye brows floating above a disproportionate frame. My little boy would laugh at this photo and not believe it was his Mom under that costume. He sees me as a set of open arms that are always ready to hug him and voice that's ready tell him that I love him.

Unquestionably, my life has improved since 1998.

What's Going to Work? TEAMWORK

At this point in my life, I can honestly say that I'm being held together by pins, needles, and the dedication of hundreds of caring medical professionals. Never before have I needed so many people to maintain a semblance of a functional life.

Let's count up the "ist"s,"ioner"s, and "tor"s that I see on a fairly regular basis:

• Psychiatrist
• Therapist
• Pharmacist
• Optometrist
• Opthalmologist
• Chiropractor
• Dentist
• Endodontist
• Gynecologist
• Family Practitioner
• Orthopedist (possibly soon)

If we add in Zac's list:

• Pediatrician
• Ear, Nose, and Throat Specialist

We get to the surprising number of 13. It takes 13 different medical specialists to keep me and my son healthy. The latest round of medical treatment led me to the optometrist and her partner in crime, the opthalmologist. Don't let the similar names confuse you. I found out that it's bad form to assume that they are the same profession. I had to go see an actual medical doctor, that would be the opthalmologist, to diagnose bacterial conjunctivitis in both of my eyes. I didn't have full out pink eye, but I had red, watery eyes for at least two months before finally taking an afternoon off and going to see my eye care specialist.

I'm back on antibiotics for my eyes. I put eye drops in four times a day. My chronic v problems are still lingering. An interesting side effect of taking 10 separate rounds of anti-fungal antibiotics is that hair starts becoming brittle at the ends. An afternoon at the hair salon and I came out with most of my hair gone, back to a length that I hadn't seen since I graduated college.

So, that's what's going on with me. I'm falling apart at the ripe age of 27. I rock.