A Good Morning for a Reality Check

If you ever live with me the first thing you should know, and you'll find that it's very true after just a week, is that I am not a morning person.  I can sometime pass myself off as being one, like when I worked at B's and had to open in the mornings at 5:30 and would get up at 3:45 and would be completely awake by the time I took orders on the back drive window at 6:00 sharp, but I'm just not.

In general my morning routine is this:

• wake up, go to the bathroom
• find my way back to my bedroom (which is like five steps from the bathroom, but if the hall is dark and I'm still asleep, those five steps are hell) where I will attempt to locate my glasses
• glasses on? glasses off? whatever, I go to the kitchen to get a glass (a bowl and spoon if I'm eating cereal) and get the milk jug out of the fridge
• I'll sit at the kitchen table, pour myself a full glass of milk to take with my morning meds and then eat whatever food I've taken to the table for breakfast

After breakfast, I'm generally in an alright mood as long as it isn't too early and there isn't too much noise.  The best advice I can give anyone who lives with me on how to deal with me in the mornings: don't talk to me unless absolutely necessary, or at least wait until I leave the kitchen table.  Which, in all honestly could be a while because that's where I wakeup.  And just because you see me going through my Twitter feed while eating my cereal, that does not mean I'm ready to talk. Just a FYI.

Why am I telling you this? Well, since my brother has been home for a while now, he hasn't really gotten the point yet. Or if he has, he ignores it just to annoy the shit out of me, and don't tell him this (he probably already knows) but it's been working.  He'll bang on the bathroom door when I get up, or he'll be talking so loud while I eat my breakfast that it just makes me outrageously cranky. Or, he just make snide comments as soon as my bedroom door opens.  Today however, none of this happened.  I had a good morning!

I promise there's a reason to this post...though I must admit since I'm in a good mood I'm being kind of long winded today.

As I mentioned yesterday, since the weather has been oh so lovely this week my brother and I have done some work outside.  Well, this work has lead to a massive mountain at the curb by our trashcan and the mountain has been growing.  It is definitely an eye sore, but the way we look at it, at least it's not just sitting around the property anymore!

Today is our trash day and let me tell you, we're pretty good about making sure the trash cart is out at the road for our trash man to pick up in the mornings.  Even when we do forget, our trash man will come up to the house and get it from the porch and take care of it, something that the other company we had before never did and definitely something this guy doesn't have to do as a part of his job.  But he does.

Anyway.  We didn't expect much from the growing mountain to be taken today when the trash man came around.  We definitely hadn't expected for the trash man to come knock on our door and have a little chat with us.  He told my brother that he didn't have enough room to take everything today but that he would take as much as he could and then he'd come back for the rest of it.

Our trash man speaks very poor English and though we can get frustrated with that sometimes, we couldn't when he was all smiles and so friendly.  When he and my brother got done talking, he reached out to shake my brother's hand and before he turned to go back to the truck, he wished us a Merry Christmas.  We watched as he dumped the four carts we had out there and threw some of the stuff from outside into the back of the truck.  He even ran after two plastic bags that got picked up from the wind so they weren't just laying in our yard.  Before he took off to go to the next house he waved at my brother and I.

My dad who had been in his bedroom came out and asked what was going on when he saw us standing by the window.  We told him about the trash man and my dad smiled.  He told us that our trash man was the friendliest person and explained how every time he sees him he's got a big smile on his face and always waves.

It was then that I realized something.  Our trash man is probably one of those people that may not have a smooth life.  His family might be struggling from paycheck to paycheck.  For all I know, he could be having the most terrible year of his life but he seems to love his job. A job that a lot of people wouldn't think twice about.  Our trash man doesn't have to wave at us when he drives by, nor does he have to smile and say hello, he sure as hell doesn't have to do us favors like coming to the house to get our cart or taking more of our junk than he's supposed to.

The mystery behind our trash man is interesting to me this morning because I've realized, once again, how much I take for granted.  Like all this junk we have around our place.  Sure we don't use it, but at one point we did and there's a lot of memories behind that stuff.  Like all those garden hoses that are so worn we had to pitch.  We used to have massive gardens every summer and I can remember hours were spent with my family and some close friends tending the garden and then processing the produce throughout the summer.  Those are memories that I sometimes forget about but I find are really wonderful ones.

I feel like in the midst of my rambling I might have forgotten the main point to this post but I do know that I'm thinking more of all the positive things and the blessings I've had this year.  Who knew that our trash man would give me such a reality check?  I think I might even try to get up early next Thursday to greet him outside and tell him thank you.

Frustration Overload

For me, it's just a fact of life that I have to deal with.  A fact I should say that I'm still learning how to deal with.  The fact is this: I will probably always have joint pain.

Normally I have very little pain.  Sometimes my knee or hips will ache if I've sat too long and haven't gotten up to walk in a while.  Other times, like when I feel a cold front start moving in my elbow and knees start aching.

Most of the time, I don't even bother taking any meds for the aches and pains because I can mentally stick it through until I'm able to go on and continue what I'm doing.

It's so frustrating though, on nights like tonight when I've had a great day and my evening is ruined with an intense pain flare.  Does it matter that I volunteered three hours bright and early this morning helping to decorate Christmas cookies for a Christmas party tomorrow? Does it matter that I spent my gift card from my great aunt Dottie buying grown up things to organize my room? Does it matter that I actually spent some time organizing when I did finally get home?

No. None of it matters because this intense pain takes over everything.

This pain is so strong that I can't just watch tv or have a conversation with my brother without being distracted for 95% of the time.

What I find the most frustrating of this pain is that it's not even in the area that I had my hip replacement.  Hell, it's not even in the same leg.  I've experienced this pain, in the same area for years before and after my surgery and I've been told it's just rerouted pain basically.  But why?

The fact that I'm probably always going to have this joint pain is a major downer.  Especially if I stop and look back at my day, I'm pretty sure that the three hours it took to frost those cookies started this evening's pain from standing so long.  Sure it was three hours and anyone would be dead tired at the end of the day, but on other days that I have this pain, I didn't spend three hours standing instead I was just doing normal stuff.

Frustration.  That's where I'm at tonight with this whole figuring out how to deal with this 'fact'.  I'm frustrated that I can't just push my way through it without having to take a pain pill because at this point a couple of ibuprofen just isn't going to cut it.  I'm frustrated that I practically have to beg my friends to keep me in a conversation on Twitter or via text to attempt to keep my mind off of the pain.

Frustration at the notion that I once thought that I was okay with probably always having this pain, when clearly tonight I know that I'm not okay with it.

It's a fight. A fight that I feel that I am ill prepared for and one that I currently feel very alone fighting.

Nice Weather is a Good Thing

Sunday through today have been fantastic in the weather sense.  In South Central Kansas we've been having some crazy weather this December.  It's been going from super windy and nearly freezing cold, to warmer and raining, to sleet/hail/snow/lightening storms and then, this wonderful warm weather (with an unwanted, but we'll take it anyway, breeze).  I'm not saying that it's hot or anything, I mean I don't think we've hit 70 recently, or if we have the wind-chill has made it lower.  It's not paradise type weather but I'll take this over sleet/hail/snow/lightening storm!

Due to this wonderful Decemeber weather (and that my brother is home), we've done some major work in the last few days.  It simply started Sunday with my brother deciding to grill some ribs we had in the freezer that were taking up far too much room, was almost ready to be tossed out and were in general waiting for the right moment to fire up the grill!  I drove us up to Gander Mountain where we got my brother's favorite wood to grill with and came back to get the fire started up so it would be hot enough to grill at a decent time.

While we were waiting for the grill to heat up, my brother and I started to clean our front porch off as well as the concrete slab that sits directly off the stairs where we currently keep our (large) grill at since my brother gave it to us.  It was so wonderful out that we finished the cleaning and drug mom outside where we sat her in the two seat glider and propped her legs up on her many pillows on the small deck table we had.  The three of us were out there just bull shitting for the longest time, and the three dogs were happy as could be because they got unlimited playing/running around/snoofing time!

Since my brother motivated me on Sunday to clean outside to help get rid of stuff around the place that my parents have been meaning to do but haven't (for quite some time) I agreed to help any of the warm days until we got our little (well, it started out as little, now it's a bit...extravagant) to do list.  So the last two days we've been working outside near the garage, and it's still not done yet but it's a massive improvement from what it was before!

This nice weather has been great for getting me back into my cleaning/organizing mode that I was in a couple of weeks ago.  I kind of lost steam when it got really cold and my body was just like "nope, not gonna anything but lay in bed and read/sleep/watch Netflix/surf the internet when the internet actually works".  I'm hoping that I can stay in this new motivational cleaning zone until I go back to school so hopefully I can make some new habits so I don't end up with a bunch of cleaning to do at once.

The Blogmopolitan Quiz

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday afternoon between doing some yard work, helping grill dinner and some cleaning on the internet reading blogs.  One thing I found was the Blogmopolitan Quiz that I first found through Nadine.  So naturally, I decided to partake in this quiz and fill it out!

Isn't much of an improvement from yesterday's roller coaster of a Monday, but it's something! Happy Tuesday!