Fired #MicroblogMonday

Last Monday I woke up in excruciating gut pain, stabby and sometimes diffuse and I crept to the bathroom and back to bed, where I spent almost the whole day barely able to move at all. Since it never got worse and eventually got slightly better, I made an appointment to see my OB/GYN for my day off on Wednesday. I stayed miserable and in lots of pain and limped along with little to no sleep because PAIN.

Thursday my doc's office called to tell me it was a burst 2cm cyst that was "resolving" and take some ibuprofen and you'll be fine. I pointed out that I'm deathly allergic to the stuff and that I remained barely able to work and asked what to do about the pain instead. 24 hours of misery later, his office calls back and says "he only prescribes narcotics after surgery so go to the ER if you can't manage the pain."

Dude is totally fired as my doctor. I deserve better and I won't settle for "just relax, it will be fine" ever again.

My techs bullied me into going to the doctor by making me an appointment with a new doc across town and demanding my boss give me Saturday off (after a crying I was in so much pain break when I rarely even take 5 minutes for lunch). I slept for 15 hours Friday night once I got some little baby narcotics to help with the pain. I'm still miserable so tomorrow I go in search of a doctor who will actually take care of me instead of treating my severe pain like I'm drug-seeking. Hint: I work with drugs all day and see exactly what abusing them does. If I ask for a prescription, I am truly miserable and desperate.

Banned purchases #MicroblogMondays

My spouse's list: coloring and puzzle books (2 for girls, 2 for adults), tiny sketch pad at tourist trap museum.

Kid list: all new school supplies even though we probably had most things somewhere

All of us: way too much take out and fast food and restaurant food, fan for living/dining room.

Overall I think the "no we aren't buying new things right now" litany works fairly well on the girls and their demands for new things. Since we have a good list of what needs replacing, we don't buy things on impulse just because it's a good deal but if there is a good deal, we are ready to take advantage (see: spouse's new shirt for work). But food is still very stockpiled and not in the buying ban. That is a whole nother blog post!

Planning well for meals continues to be a struggle and I think may be reassigned from my spouse to me so my spouse is solely responsible for laundry and dishes.

How do you handle buying new things? How do you cope when someone else drops the ball and how many chances do they get to pick it up again?

Buying ban update #MicroblogMondays

We are currently in month something or other of the buying ban, wherein we buy no things, only food, travel, and replacements for essential items. Maybe 2? It goes until December, when we intend to buy only festive winter holiday gifts, then pick a new buying ban goal.

Replacements:

12 or so screws for bed (from I.kea but we live far away & have been to impatient for free replacements to arrive since the bed got broken in fun adult circumstances but the first several tries failed to work but the cost too little to return)

Coat/backpack rack for front door (lost originally purchased hooks)

Not replacements but deemed cheaper than renting repeatedly:

Book of life dvd 

Zootopia dvd

Just stuff we bought: 

Sandwich containers for lunches (x8, imagining my spouse gets a job)

Snack size containers for lunches (x8 small, 5 medium)

Dress shirt for Spouse (on super clearance; upon wardrobe survey, this makes 5 work shirts which might be too few)

Later this week I will discuss each group in more detail and hopefully hit the high points on the buying ban experience.

Jeggy cat #MicroblogMondays

Last week, Little Monster started requesting to see jeggy cat. I had no idea what that meant at all. She also wants to see my friend across the country's cat by name on the book o' faces so I initially thought Jeggy was a proper name of some mystery cat. The Kid asked to borrow my iDevice and flipped over to open up Sushi C.at and Little Monster eagerly pointed to the very blob-like cat and exclaimed "jeggy cat! See! She jeggles when she eats swooshy." Then I learned she meant jiggly cat. I'm so god she still sometimes mispronounces sushi as "swooshy" because it keeps her little just a little bit longer. She starts preschool in a week or two.

All the vitamins #MicroblogMonday

I have now purchased the last prenatal vitamins I will ever own (unless I miraculously get knocked up and stay that way). I figure I won't ever buy any more because, really, who am I kidding? This third child idea is a pipe dream. It is mostly freeing to know I will never buy another rotten vitamin again. Blech I hate vitamins so much. I'm also glad to have an end date to this goofy idea of mostly mine so we won't be in infertility limbo forever. Hopefully next cycle I can get time off work to go have an HS.G but I decided on no more progesterone levels for now (anovulatory last cycle, not so surprising anyway). I can't fathom how I will manage doctor visits if I do get pregnant with the current state of my job and I hate that. The total lack of flexibility and coverage for sick days irks me. It obviously doesn't surprise me at all. Sigh. I decided today that corporate will meet my demands or I will find another job so I'm sprucing up my cv in preparation...

Fireworks #MicroblogMonday

Last year the Kid really wanted to go see fireworks. Little Monster needed to go to bed far earlier so we split up and the Kid and I went, against my better judgement. She hates loud noises. We went early and ran into friends and had a grand time. The fireworks were pretty. Afterward the kid had a 3 hour panic attack about a variety of things she had been worrying about... and it was too loud.

This year the girls and my spouse are on vacation and I'm home alone. I think I'll skip the fireworks.

Drama llama rama #MicroblogMonday

*Actually this is kinda full length. Tl;dr Ugh avoiding being dramatic while establishing safe boundaries is wicked hard and I am flailing struggling.

Have you read the Llama llama, something drama books? My girls have the whole collection. We read one a night for the better part of a year. Now naturally any time there is drama, I frame it in llama terms. In my head and under my breath when my very dramatically maybe divorcing patients are in the pharmacy, I recite a line or two. "Llama llama, relationship drama..."

In this llama-filled context, I often remind myself not to be a drama llama. It is really wicked hard. My extended family is trying my patience and making me cry because I am left out again (like always?). On my mom's side, the family business is celebrating a big round number of years. I'm the only one who never worked there because after I applied twice and didn't get hired, I gave up and decided my uncle was a weasel face and the struggle wasn't worth the drama. We weren't invited to the celebration by my uncle or anyone. If the expectation was that my mom would invite us, that's just codependent silliness and avoiding communicating directly. She's a space case enough of the time that we are lucky my cousin mentioned it in passing so I inquired further or we might have heard nothing about it at all until someone was upset we weren't there. It would have been my fault we weren't there too.

On the spouse's family side, we are expecting our first nephew (or surprise niece) soon. I figured that, since the family tradition is baby showers where you meet the baby, I ought to start planning that in the next few weeks. Last week a cousin sent out baby shower invitations for a few weeks from now. I don't really know what to say, but I sobbed for a good long while. Context: the last wedding in the family was in 2009 and there's been one occasion that might have required a baby shower but was complicated by a very long nicu stay and one of twins dying, the other coming home during flu lock-down season's start. I thought about a shower but was swamped with rotations so didn't make time for it. I'll have to apologize eventually, but I'd cry too much right now. Anyway it isn't like there's a drama-free way to say "I am super upset at being excluded even if you're intending to be helpful because I work too much and live too far away. Not consulting me hurt and now I don't have enough notice to even attend. Do you think I like being cut off? This was the only way to pay the bills when it counted and fear won." Furthermore I'd always imagined this would be the redeeming baby shower, the one I would enjoy because I got to help plan it so we could skip triggers and there'd be a baby around to change the subject if things got too complex. Bah. Expectations, ruining things again. Maybe. See? I half expect to see some wool growing into my eyes and my hands turning to hooves because somehow I have become a drama llama.

How do you avoid drama? How do you manage expectations while still preventing yourself from being hurt by expecting nothing?

Buying ban

We decided that, in light of our goal to declutter our lives and the house, we will buy nothing we don't eat or use to clean until December aside from sweatshirts for the girls to wear on vacation, tennis shoes for me, work pants for my spouse if there's work to go with it (we all have zero pairs/fitting sweatshirts, respectively), and the repairs on my shoes starting July 1st. We left our entertainment budget alone so we will probably buy some digital books but that's mostly to prevent library overdue fees. No clothes, no house doodads, no new furniture to replace the recliner we recently ditched, no shoes, no physical books, no toys. So far it has been a challenge to shift my thinking away from "what do we need?" toward "how can we solve that problem with no new things?" and I'm not so sure this will ever be simple. Maybe in a few months? 

We have narrowed our new car options down to only two so we can start planning for how to afford it. We don't yet have a timeline for a new car purchase though. I have been drooling over houses and accepting that we have another year or two before we can buy a place of our own. This is mostly because we would rather buy land than a place in town. Here if we bought a house, our mortgage would be a third of what we are paying in rent for a house like we'd want to downsize to, about 25% less if we bought this very house in a very nice neighborhood. Our landlord would like us to buy this place but I'm thinking there's no way we would want it. It's old and the wiring is incredibly lousy and the place is huge. We have 4 bedrooms and use 2 on a regular basis, a third maybe twice a week. The basement is a mess of terrifying wires wandering around aimlessly, ventilation taped together, and a permanent puddle. I like the deck and the front porch and I like the idea of the garage (currently full of junk and the freezer) but otherwise there's not much to recommend it. (Yep, I recognize this is the exact opposite of housing on the coastal cities where nobody can afford to buy. Here there are no decent rentals and a glut of houses for sale, many foreclosures that are next to free, and so many grand old houses nobody can afford to keep up, much like this one. Our landlord bought it for a song, sold it on contract for deed, they quit paying after a few months, trashed the place, then our landlord recruited some fools to flip it and six weeks later, we moved in with the painted floor still tacky.)

Did I mention the decluttering? We are decluttering in a massive way. So far we have removed a recliner, 7 boxes of stuff, and moved most of the kitchen contents downstairs to a shelf (which is now full). In a few months we will reevaluate the stuff that moved downstairs and probably get rid of much of it. I'm pretty sure we aren't going to try to sell any of our things, just going to donate them and leave them on the curb and be done with the clutter. It is lovely to get all the dishes in the dishwasher at once. The downsize could be permanent. I never imagined it could be so freeing to have fewer things. Next week the goal is to dispose of our dresser. This means purging clothes and relocating them to the drawers under the bed that aren't assembled yet but that's an exciting prospect. Less mess! Less mess to be made by far less laundry and general stuff!

At first it felt counter-productive to downsize our stuff while not buying new things because WHAT IF WE NEED THAT?!?! Now I think it makes sense to absolutely downsize. We planned to add hooks to the front entryway for the girls' coats and backpacks. Now that we can't buy them we either need to find those we bought earlier and lost or find something to trade someone for them. If we are still desperate for a solution in September, we will reevaluate and maybe coax someone who wants to get the girls new things to get fancy hooks for them. I'm really excited to find out what life is like with less stuff to get in the way. #whoneedsit

Rabbit hole #MicroblogMondays

I work down the street from both a women's health clinic and a pediatrics and OB/gyn clinic. I never have time off. Logically if we ever get pregnant, I need a provider and it makes sense it be someone right down the street. (And if we ever get to the "have a baby" part of pregnancy, I would turn up at the hospital in the next town over because the one here is not somewhere I'm willing to be a patient, but really, it doesn't matter to me who catches the baby.) I've now been twice and it was HARD. It is way too easy to be judgmental about the 30 year old with 6 kids and I need to knock it off. It's very reasonable for it to hit me that we will never have 3 children under 5 and it's all right to have it hurt some but I have to try to keep myself in some kind of sensible headspace. So far, nope. Maybe it's time to reconsider this whole comical idea of a third child. Maybe those babies who might have been haunt me more than I thought.

Last night I took my first metf.ormin and prenatal vitamin. It felt like I stood on the high dive platform and looked way down to those pills in my hand, and like I might drown if I jumped. I did it anyway.

#MicroblogMonday Myths

I grew up in the sticks on a farm. Until I was in my 20s and lived in the city, I was sure that fireflies and ice cream trucks existed only in movies. Now they are everywhere and it still startles me.

Ends

My favorite part of my job is hospice. This puts me in a tiny minority of pharmacists and healthcare providers. Almost all of healthcare is busily striving to extend life at any cost. Hospice is focused on letting people die with dignity and comfort. My hospice patients are one of two sorts: admitted with months and months left to live or only hours, maybe a day at most. I wish it were always the former sort of patient so families could have the time for healing and the patient wouldn't get more futile treatments. Friday we admitted the latter sort of patient and Sunday the patient needed more pain medicine because the patient surprised us all by surviving that long. The whole family was there with the patient when I walked in, drinking coffee and eating the cookies I've seen at every death vigil in a facility, yet nobody seemed to be tasting any of it. There's something transcendent about a good death where the family gathers to support the dying person one last time, then is together to lean on each other for support after the death.

My spouse and I are probably unusual in that we have told our girls exactly how we want our end of life care to look, where we want our memorial stone to be, and that we want to be cremated. We have told my sibling and my parents as well. My in-laws laughed and then hid when we tried to start that conversation. If I could have one wish, it would be that everyone considered their death and told their loved ones what treatments they want and don't want. We should all get that good death, surrounded by loved ones, with no more pain. May we all be so fortunate.

Miracles and disappointment #MicroblogMonday

Awesome news: Remember last summer when I was dizzy and had all that physical therapy? I went from "can't really walk" to human in 6 weeks after being dropped just so. About ten years ago I bought a bike, a really nice one, hoping to embrace the biking my spouse loves so. I quickly discovered that my balance on the thing was awful and I kept crashing. After maybe twice with nearly broken bones, I parked the thing and ignored it. Last fall I thought it might be time to see if my newly better balance would improve my bike riding so I asked my spouse to take it in for a tune up. 4 weeks ago I insisted we order a bike rack and haul both bikes in to be tuned up, 2.5 weeks ago they actually went in, and yesterday we picked them up. I tested out my bike riding the block to the car and had ZERO balance problems. Victory! 

Less awesome news: We didn't have the chance to have the Kid's birthday party near the actual day because of spring break and health shenanigans, so we rescheduled it. After a few weeks of debating inviting a few versus her entire class and all 4 neighborhood friends who aren't classmates, we went whole hog and invited everyone. An elaborate Mars cake was constructed for the Ready J.et Go party, games planned, house prepared. Nobody came. The Kid invited her stuffed animals and they played musical chairs in the living room. Nobody cried during the party but it was close for three of us. Her friend whose party was the same day but an hour earlier gave her a present though. I didn't think it was possible for me to feel worse than I had before about uprooting the Kid for my career and I was wrong.

The wild #MicroblogMondays

I scheduled a repeat pregnancy loss visit with a new OB/gyn last week. We decided to see what happens and if a next pregnancy happens, then that's super (if not, then in a year we get used to this family size). Little Monster is sassy and bosses the kid around and it's strange and they are both huge. Our cat bruised hir spinal column and had a few weeks of intermittent inability to use back legs on purpose, but now it seems to be all better.

I kind of want everything to change and nothing all at once. The changes are abrupt and incremental all at once. I never imagined there would be a time like this, where there might be a third child and where our cat is slowing down and getting to "senior cat" life. It has been years of talking about child three and debating and then suddenly, the shift happened and we decided to see where life takes us and that RPL testing we haven't done but probably ought to is a reality.

Life is startling when what was immobile and unchanging is suddenly (but not so suddenly after all) new. Things here remain quite wild and yet I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

Public decency

It's interesting to think about what we share and what we don't. I am an avid user of the app/website goo.dreads and I set a reading goal at the start of the year to read 40 books. Then in November I realized I hadn't really watched my progress and had logged only 25 books. I quickly opened my reading app and browsed the contents, realizing I'd read 20 books in the previous month or two alone and if I just listed those, I had exceeded my annual goal.

Then I looked twice at the covers of the books. Mostly naked or shirtless guys, some partially clothed women, almost all romance novels. I decided that the more NC-17 sorts of books would stay off the public list because...  I really couldn't tell you why my romance novel habit is so embarrassing that I won't list all the mediocre smut I read publicly. I suppose it's a way to protect my anonymity and maintain my privacy. The particular sub-genre I read a ton of this year is perhaps more mortifying in the light of day than just some R or NC-17 romances.

It makes me wonder why the shame around sex sticks in my mind so well. Or I'm not even sure if it's shame or not, but it probably is. The other folks at work were having a borderline nsfw discussion and I certainly could have added to it in a suitably raunchy way, but I just smiled and said nothing. On the one hand, perhaps that's boss-like to avoid saying inappropriate things. Mostly I suspect it's the result of the closet I am still kind of in. My policy on my sexual orientation and gender identity is that I will tell if someone asks but I don't volunteer information. My relationship looks hetero and cis so nobody questions and I don't tell. A chunk of it is that public, face-of-the-company employees get held to a higher standard than everyone else and I don't want who I am to impact things in this small town if I can hide and keep being me in private and respectable in public.

I also wonder what life would be like if we were totally honest. Would it hurt us all or would we be better for it? Why do we have moral standards anyway when the taboos being broken through different sorts of sexual relationships aren't hurting anyone (thinking of teh gayz and the polyamorous folk, maybe polygamy, non-cis gendered folks specifically)? Who is kept in power by all that moral high ground they claim and why is it so beneficial to have (or argue that you do)? People are so weird sometimes and then needlessly cruel to each other.

Leap

I have made a lot of giant leaps based on intuition in my life. I'm not sure if that's good or bad or what, but it is fact. I knew within ten seconds of meeting my spouse that it was love and that I was all in, for better or worse. We were engaged 6 weeks after we started dating. Before I hung up my coat on interview day, I was sure about where I would go to pharmacy school. And this job, this move, that was a huge leap. I saw the job description and went "aha! The perfect job, aside from not being the most perfect job that I didn't get! It actually requires all of my skills and no nights and short weekend hours!"

The strange thing to me is how much I have second guessed this job. I know I questioned myself previously either as or just after taking those big leaps, but I don't remember this level of disquiet and insomnia. Granted I think it's normal work insomnia that seems to just be part of my life as a pharmacist - the mistakes wake me up at night, usually the little ones that repeat themselves in a dream loop until I'm wide awake.

Tomorrow we take another leap. My spouse and I decided on a Really Big outdoor scenic adventure (that I'm henceforth abbreviating RBA because I love three letter acronyms) for next summer and we start training tomorrow (well, later today). I have no idea how this trip will be possible but we need the goal to get us into gear. We plan on a week-long bike trip with big daily mileage goals to see everything. I am starting to work on my balance, my bike goes to the shop for repair, and my spouse is tasked with gathering an equipment list and training plan. There will be a chart or three. It's daunting to know how far there is to go and yet to know it's possible.

I liked what Josie's mom said the other week (excuse the bad paraphrase): being overweight is hard, working out is hard, eating right is hard, eating junk is hard (on your body); choose your hard. Today I choose to work hard toward a week of playing hard and relaxing away from work. Tomorrow I will choose it again.

The case of the red lentil pasta

When I first got this job, I had a week of training in another city at another store. The company put me in a hotel, a pretty nice extended stay with a pool (that I didn't use because I was sick either from the antibiotics or the infection that raged on despite the antibiotics) and my own dinky kitchen. This meant I cooked. One night I was at Giant Red Box store getting laundry detergent and dinner. I was perusing the dinner-in-a-box choices and discovered a kit for mac and cheese that has some veggies and green lentil pasta. The price was within my dinner budget so I decided to try it. Only the next day when I was raving about its deliciousness did I realize it was gluten free. 

So then I demanded my spouse try it. While viewed as tolerable, it was not much favored. I decided to try red lentil pasta, because why not? It might be awesome. And it totally is awesome. Om nom nom. BUT! The best part? Little Monster is forever stealing my food. I always make extra just in case. Tonight she liked my red lentil pasta with Parmesan cheese so much she needed her own fork. So instead of cereal for dinner that my spouse served the girls (no judgement, cereal happens, I get that today was busy and such), Little Monster also got fiber and protein and a bit of fat from my pasta. Victory!

On the food front, I have no real hope of the Kid expanding what she eats, although today she did try a cinnamon roll and ate it. That's not technically a new food since she ate them until maybe 18 months ago so it's a return to an old food. Still! baby step maybe. Sigh. Yesterday LM discovered her ribs and noted how much bigger and poke-ier her sister's ribs are than hers.

The here and now

At long last the Kid really reads. She didn't feel confident she could read well enough up until just lately when it clicked that she could do it. I could pretend that I have no idea where she gets the "it must be perfect or I won't even start, it's too hard if it takes more than 2 tries, fear of failure paralyzed me" mentality, but clearly it's her parents modeling that in some behavior or other. It sure isn't in what we tell her or how we praise her efforts (and she often points this out and uses great effort as a reason why something must be kept FOREVER) so we adults need to look over ourselves and root out the perfectionism. Her favorite books are Wayside School gets a little stranger and Calvin and Hobbes. She got really into a patent law discussion recently when we tried to explain it after a strip where calvin's dad starts telling him the story of the Extra Awesome Tool Patent or some such. 2nd grade. Whoa. I mostly kick myself for not having taken a job that meant we could have stayed put because this school is so inferior to her previous one. She may learn something this year but it's hard to say. We do multiplication at home, they do single digit addition to equal something under 20 in school. Her outfits tend toward bright and with patterns regardless of whether the patterns match each other. Unicorn socks are much sought after but we just have the one pair, 3 sizes too big because I guessed wrong at the store.

Little Monster is going through the most terrible part of being two. She has strong opinions about everything, including that the only song in Just Dance that can be played is Istanbul (not Constantinople) by They Might Be Giants and that the color of her controller's light change at least twice a song. Screaming and tantrums occur every few minutes because she is so MAD. Naps are mostly gone but sometimes that means a sane bedtime near 8pm so that's all right. She loves her purple "fizbee" and her toy bulldog and white rat. The rat looks real enough that I often start and think a dead rat snuck into my bed or onto the driveway before I look again and see its fluff and tag remnants. She keeps changing her identity from Donnie (fav ninja reptile) to Little Monster, Esquire (her full name with all its syllables, no nicknames or omissions) and then to Princess Something (Sofia, Elsa, McStuffins, Mer-da, Anna, Baymax, etc.). She must be going through a gross motor growth or development spurt because she crashes and leaps to her crashing scraped-up sadness often. Last week she was being raced down the block in the stroller by the Kid and she got tipped forward onto her face. I think a front tooth moved in addition to a tiny chip but it didn't bother her too much so we let her be. The girls now can only go 2 houses from home and never across the street for LM and absolutely no stroller. Today she first refused bandages for her dripping blood scrapes, then demanded them, then cried and hid when we tried to put them on her at all, with hitting and writhing when the bandage got within 6 inches of a scrape. Most nights she sleeps on our floor and still has the accursed baby plug (aka pacifier) and someday that will change but not yet. I can't bring myself to make her give up that last baby vestige.

Fantasy versus reality

I am recognizing that my ideas about life after pharmacy school were, well, idealized and wrong.

When the Kid was little, we both read her bedtime stories and shared the tuck-in routine. It was nice. When I started pharmacy school and she discovered being an insomniac no matter how early we put her to bed or how totally we attempted to exhaust her, I ceded all bedtime routine to my spouse. I always expected it to be temporary during school but then just-about-bedtime became my regular study group time so I would get cut short reading a story, crying would ensue, so I stopped helping with bedtime entirely. When Little Monster was tiny and during the summer she was zero, I would read her story and my spouse would read the Kid's story. Even as she started toddling I still helped with Little Monster's story, reading it ten times over while the Kid had her story read to her. Then rotations happened, I was gone for the year, and then I was hunting for a job or waiting in near-snarl suspenseful anxiety. I opted out of bedtime because I get super short-tempered when I'm tired and I am fed up (see: bedtime with a stressed anxious kid and a 2 year old for the definition of "things which push a parent to get fed up"). Now that I have the long-awaited job and things are almost settled, I had thought I would be getting back into bedtime.

Instead I am realizing that I am snarly and short-tempered when my feet hurt, as they do every day lately, and I make bedtime so much slower and incite triple the Kid rioting that my spouse does. I kind of hate that in the morning I'm the taskmaster who is hurrying the kid along and at night I am hurrying her along to bed so I can get some rest and we never have the chance to go her speed (because she ignores my prompts that would keep her on schedule and then demands a full hour wind-down starting 30 minutes after her bedtime. For now we just need to get through with as little tension as possible so I will continue to opt out of bedtime. Hopefully the solutions will present themselves soon.

Turn and burn

We have been wildly busy this last month. I got the job offer on a Friday at noon and started training that Monday, with no time to do much packing over the weekend. It will be an interesting place to work for, and I think it will be lovely in time. The first year will be hard or horrendous or both alternating days, but that's life. I have no night hours and only a half day every other weekend so that's amazing.

This move has gone somewhere between very badly and "train wreck" level awful. The new house is bigger, with 4 bedrooms upstairs and a larger overall downstairs (before the third bedroom was next to the living room downstairs). It came with no fridge and broken central air, so we bought a fridge and sweltered until our landlord could get here to fix the AC. The windows open at least, even if the lead paint chips are plentiful. None of the cupboard doors latch or fit right, but there are plenty. The washer and dryer hook ups exist but no appliances there either. The literal closet half bath is missing a toilet, and that's fine by me as it's kid sized at best.

The first weekend we had a moving truck, only 2/3 of our stuff made it on when we ran out of time, then the next weekend we rented a truck that was way too small to load up the rest so a lot of things vanished (in addition to the dumpster of junk we intentionally ditched on top of the dumpster of stuff we ditched back in May). It's freeing to have less stuff, and yet it is still more than we need so we will pare down some more. There will be more discussion of this.

Little Monster is handling the change in residence fairly well. She didn't have many little friends she saw often anyway. My spouse will be home for some time to hang out with her. In cool weather I can walk to work. The Kid is floundering badly but that was expected but it's still so hard. She is testing every boundary almost every day, if not every moment.

I am enjoying how varied this pharmacy is and it's nice that it keeps me on my toes all day. I just wish I could take 5 minutes for lunch. Maybe in a few months I can find the time.

This is home

Growing up on a farm near a claustrophobic little town, I ran as fast as I could out of there after high school. Much to my surprise, I only ran to the nearest city for college, but it worked. City! I loved it for the first year or so. Then I wound up with my own apartment in a big old house that had been split up. It was the oldest house for miles around and had originally been at the center of a big estate so it was on the highest hill around. It was 27 steps up from the garage (aka carriage house) to the front door. Sitting in my living room I looked into the third floor windows of the apartment building next door. The best part about that apartment was the giant yard. If anywhere reminded me of Tatania's bower, it was that oasis. So much green, lovely flowers, big old trees, it was awesome. Back there I could pretend I was out somewhere with no neighbors for miles around for up to 10 minutes at a time. Then someone across the street would shout or kids from the next block would come screaming by on their bikes or there'd be a car crash.

Since we've been together, the spouse and I have wandered a great deal. In the last ten years, we've moved ten times and lived here for three of those years. Nowhere before has come close to being ours. Some of those changes have been good, a few very sad, but hardly any nostalgia. We took a picture of us with the kid in her baby bucket when we left the apartment where we lived when she was born, but I have no idea where it is now. We would have stayed there if we could have but the place and the people weren't worth cobbling together work until a real job opened up at the time. In pictures I have to guess the age of the kid to tell you where we lived then because the places are meaningless, hollow, just wherever we had landed.

I've noticed that folks either want a job and that takes them to a place, but they don't let it become home most of the time because they know they're chasing the job wherever it takes them, or they are attached to the place and will take whatever work there might be to stay, sometimes to the point of starving during unemployment. Complex place-work relationships seem to be the norm these days with so many people unmoored or feeling tied to a place.

I've been trying to see what I think about this place we live now. I mean, it's been a good three years here. We've built a good niche in the community and have improved our little corner of it. But when the moment of truth came, we didn't choose to stay and take the work this place offered. We decided on chasing the dream job (spoiler: dream 1 didn't work out so there has been frantic job searching while I've mostly stayed pretty chill that the right job will appear). I guess I'm not sure if that choice means this place isn't worth fighting for, or if all that wandering has meant we are no good at recognizing a great place when it's right under our noses. At any rate, here we are, at an end and a beginning.

It's further interesting to have a job interview where the employer really wants to be sure you want the place as much as the job. I get that rural healthcare is hard because since most folks train in cities, they get used to cities and want those amenities, so rural places are a pit stop used only to get enough experience to get the city job that's always been the goal. I believe I've complained about it as a patient. We've been here three years and I've run through five primary care providers (and the ob I liked has also left) and I didn't have one for the first 8 months we were here. Still it's strange to have the "why this place?" question weigh so heavily. I have to decide how honest an answer to give in the second interview - the place meets my minimum criteria of a pizza place, grocery store, school, and job by far and it even has a dealer for our quirky little car, or I could try to capture the intangible "I think this may be my place" gut reaction I had when I visited the town. I'm a very private person. In almost no interviews have I mentioned the girls early on. In one, I got asked "so you live with your parents in Town then?" and I laughed so hard. So I explained that no, none of my parents are in the "we" who have lived here three years. For this second interview, my family is asked to come so my spouse can also be on board with this move and this place so hopefully we stay for years to come. Strange to think of an employer who wants an employee as invested in the place as the job, but yet that's the kind of place I want to work, where when they say they're committed to quality rural healthcare, they mean it.

I just hope we have time to get ready to move if this job happens since I'm likely to start right away.