An end

My wonderful mother died on Christmas day, 12/25/2012, from heart failure complicated by renal insufficiency.  I have been in a fog, a beautiful numbness, for weeks now.  But today I will go and commit her remains to their final resting place, and I feel like I'm going to throw up.  The funeral/memorial service was 4 weeks ago-- and by the way, it seems like it was just a few days ago-- but with all the bureaucratic red tape and scheduling, her cremains will be interred later today.  There is a knot in my chest, my stomach is roiling, and I am on the verge of tears every other minute.

 

Being a grown-up sucks.

 

Time has been so fluid.  I actually had to do a double-take at the calendar when I just wrote that it had been a month since the funeral.  It seems like just a couple of weeks ago.  Or yesterday.  I suppose at some point before, oh, spring I need to send out acknowledgment cards.  There just seems to be so much still to do, when all I want to do is nothing.

Four years ago today

Four years ago on this date, I lost something precious. Something that, to me, was irreplaceable. Every New Years celebration reminds me that this date is coming, as macabre as that is. And it's really hard to believe that four years have gone by. How did I blink and miss four years?

When did she meet me?

who needs capital letters or punctuation i dont know do you

I'm frittering away time today going over vendors' W-9s, and have come upon one that has me boggled.  They used no punctuation or capital letters.  None at all.  Not in their name, address, etc.  I had three thoughts burst into my head:

 

1) Who in the world thought that was appropriate for a piece of business paperwork? And,

 

2) Unless it is secretly Archy doing business in the new millenium.  Then,

 

3) I realized how long it had been since I read any of the "archy and mehitabel" collections.  I need to rectify that immediately!

 

So.... yeah.  I'm still alive.

It's all mine!

Today I am experiencing a mixture of overwhelming excitement and stomach-churning dread.  In the wee hours of the morning, I made the final payment on my car.  It's actually a month early, but I went ahead and paid the balance just to be finished with the darned thing.  I feel like celebrating and throwing up all at the same time.  With my luck, the engine will just drop out of the thing while I'm driving home tonight.

Smoking and lippy, the remix

Not long ago, I wrote an entire post about two things: my lip-product addiction, and smoking.  Apparently those things are quite important in my life, because once again they have been on my mind enough that I feel the need to revisit the topics.

 

I have, unfortunately, fallen off the wagon with smoking.  I can no longer proudly say that I'm a non-smoker.  I can say that I smoke much, much less than I did in my previous smoker incarnation, but I am nonetheless a smoker again.  Rather than smoking over a pack a day, over the last couple of months I have settled into a 2-3 packs per week habit, with the majority of that happening during weekend socializing.

 

But the one or two that I smoke during the workday has had a huge impact.  And by that, I mean my work socialization has jumped like crazy.  Since I'd quit smoking before I started this job, taking a smoke break here is a new thing.  I'm generally quiet and keep to myself at work, and had forgotten how smokers' camaraderie could be.  There are people I've seen almost daily for over a year now, and we've barely done more than nod to one another.  But now that they've run into me in the smoking area, they've struck up conversations, made little jokes, talked about work, etc.  I've learned more about the insider workings, machinations, and gossip in this company during smoke breaks in the past month, than I have in a year.

 

~*~*~

 

Since I began smoking again, I noticed that my lippy addiction grew again.  I mean, I've always had it, but it did get less when I wasn't smoking.  But the return of moisture-sucking cigarette filters meant a higher need for oral emollients, and I was back on high levels of the stuff.  It hit me this past weekend, when I realized that I had more lip products just in my bag than some people own.

 

At this very moment, this is what I have on me: an Avon "Sweet Spells" lip balm (smells like candy corn); a Kiss My Face cranberry orange spf 15 lip balm; a Blistex Fruit Smoothies strawberry-banana spf 15 lip balm; a Body Shop hemp lip balm with beeswax; a Mary Kay apple berry lipstick; and a Mary Kay sugarberry lip gloss.

 

Six lip products.  Seriously.  And I have more at home; those 6 just happen to be in my bag right now.  In my defense, the Kiss My Face just joined me last weekend as a gift from a fellow lippy addict... who also gave me the most delicious butter crème lip gloss for my birthday a couple of weeks ago.  Of course, I can't complain, since I often gift her household with lippy as well.  Ah well, it is what it is.

Do you hear that?

I giggled a lot. A lot. Then I looked behind the shower curtain...