I must be delirious

Seriously. I was just walking around the floor at work on my way to the Ladies Room and I passed one of the cleaning people dusting the wall separator for the pantry area with this floppy mop-type thing on a pole. Only when I first saw it, I swear that I thought it was one of those flopsy kinds of dogs, like a Lhasa Apso or a Maltese or Pomeranian or something. I had to do a double-take to understand what I was really seeing. My head is stuffy and congested today, but I think it’s affecting my brain too. Sheesh.

Mr. Tig Wiggle-Butt

I was trying out the video function of my new camera and so I took this video of Tig. I was actually trying to capture the "Boxer Bean", but by the time I got the camera out, he wasn't beaning as much as he had been earlier. Anyway, the video isn't the best quality, but you can watch it if you want:

Video here.

Dog Pictures

He actually lies down and rests sometimes.


Boxer - Pug Standoff


Snow!


More snow (WTF? It's going to be April in a few days!)

Fighting Demons

I somehow stumbled upon this book, I’m not even sure how or where I found it, to be honest. I sometimes will hear about a book, or see a description somewhere or someone mentions some book on a message board some place and I’ll order it, where it will sit amongst the piles of books sitting in queue around my house. And then, based upon my mood, I eventually get around to reading it, usually by then having long forgotten how the book came to be in my possession in the first place.

Anyway, I picked this book out of the pile a few days ago and I have to say that it immediately spoke to me (as many books do) but deeply, on an actual physical and psychological level, much as this book spoke to me on a spiritual level. You see, this story could easily have been a chronicle of my own life, or at least part of it anyway. Maybe not exactly or literally, and certainly I have not reached the levels of resolution (nor do I have the talents or the incredible insights and understanding) that the author has. Not yet at least, but her journey deeply moved me, it hit home for me on an intense gut level that I find hard to even describe. Even now, here late, late on a “school night” I find myself awake and weeping with the raw feelings that these writings have exposed in me. Awake with thoughts and ideas and frustrations and hopes and hurts and self-loathing as well as an anguish for the person I should have been and hope for the person that I could be, with my mind spinning with the regrets of lost opportunities, and feelings of worthlessness, unworthiness, uselessness and, yes, even the anger of the past & present and hopes for what could be in the future. Maybe.

You can say that people over-eat, or drink or take drugs or gamble or compulsively spend or whatever because of unhappiness or bad childhoods or abuse, but I think the reasons are far more complicated and myriad than those stale explanations. Unhappiness is just a trite and easy answer, a label or category that people want to slap on to explain something they really don’t understand. This chronicle is not all happy endings and pat answers and resolutions but a window into the deep and complex feelings of a person who went through the lows & highs of trying to conquer her demons.

Driving Me CRAZY!

My ears are ringing and it won't stop and I'm about to go. Stark. Raving. MAD! GAH!

I'm just saying ...

'Tis the time of year

for trying to fend off opportunistic viruses. Ugh. I've been feeling something coming on all week, I don't really feel horrible, but I've had this sore throat, general achiness, head achy and with an overwhelming fatigue and just this sense of a bug trying to take hold. I worked from home yesterday with the hope that I could head it off, but no such luck. I just hate this feeling, it's so hard to keep a clear head and concentrate on anything when all I want to do is just lay down for a while. And I suspect I'm not the only one around the office who feels this way. I've been hearing a lot of hacking and sneezing coming from neighboring cubicles.

Déjà vu

Wow. I heard a car alarm today in a parking lot for about three seconds and I suddenly realized that I hadn't heard one in a very long time. I very quickly had a flashback to living in NYC and being held hostage by that kind of noise pretty much on a constant basis. It's amazing how much lower my levels of stress and anxiety are these days. The funny thing is, I don't even think I realized how stressed and anxious I was all the time back then. But the constrast to how I feel now is astounding. And it's not just the way I feel either. The last time I had my blood pressure checked, it was on the low-end of normal. Back in NYC it was approaching "high". It's amazing what stress can do to you.

Sunday Night Dread

Used to be, with my job at Old Company, the dread for the coming Monday morning would always start setting in sometime around late afternoon on Sunday and just continue to grow throughout the night. Of course, Monday was never as bad as anticipated, but I think it was just this general dissatisfaction with my job that colored this feeling. I didn’t hate my job, not really, in fact I quite often rather liked it. But there came a time when things in my old group became political, there were some morale issues and along with some micro-managing that all coalesced to create a strong feeling for me of unease for any coming work week.

Well, it’s been so long since I’ve felt the Sunday Night Dreads that I was rather taken unaware by that old feeling today. But feel it I did, but for a different reason this time. It is nothing to do with my job in particular, but with the fact that I have to drive to Boston tomorrow morning for a two-day class. I’ve become so spoiled by my 12-minute commute here that the thought of a significant commute fills me with an almost horror. I occasionally have to drive down to Boston for a meeting or something, but I can generally avoid the major traffic hours on those occasions, so it’s usually not a big deal. But this is going to be a major pain in the ASS. I’m just saying (and venting).

Anyway, I sure am happy that the Sunday Night Dreads are history for me. For the most part.

On a note related to the subject of Old Company: I received a SPAM email from a former colleague the other day. I was a little shocked. It said something like, “Good News from < insert former colleague’s name > “ and then the body of the email went on to describe some great pre-paid legal BS that I could buy. I opened the email excited to hear some news from my former colleague, who left the company last Summer to (supposedly) get involved in real estate, only to be SPAMED. I was a little shocked, to say the least. I wonder if that real estate isn’t working out after all.