Pay it forward, and resist the urge to send death-thoughts at the next driver you see doing something boneheaded.
Are you posting in a Russian accent? 
Heck, oil guys are everyone here. Pretty much everyone I know (including me) is employed in oil & gas or a field related to it.
That is a shock, but from what I’ve heard, getting bypass surgery is quite successful, and a hell of a lot better than a fatal heart attack. The “glass is half full” take on this is that they caught the problem in time - yay!
I did that yesterday - the roads were a bit slippery from a bit of snow, and the traffic in front of me was all of a sudden just not moving any more. Thank God for good driving habits - if I had been tailgating, I couldn’t have stopped in time.
Jesus Haploid Christ, I’m about to go out and bang my goddamn head against a brick wall for a few hours. It’ll be performance art. I’ll call it “I bet this will be more productive than filling out applications and sending out resumes.”
I’m going to try joining the military. I’m reasonably confident even they won’t fucking want me, but shit. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get blown to pieces.
I’ve been meaning to mention AmeriCorpsto you but I didn’t whether you were mentally prepared to surrender your dog long-term if it came to moving where a job took you temporarily.
Offers lots of hugs, then some scolding about the getting blown up part. Stop that, please. Things are bad now. They are horrible now, but they can get better.
I think that joining the Air Force would be great for you. Not a lot of combat risk and the job skills look better on your resume.
(I might be biased, but joining the Air Force really was the best thing I ever did for myself.)
The thing you need to remember is that unless you have highly desired skills, you won’t sign the papers tomorrow and leave the next day. It could be months.
I’m not saying that you don’t have valuable skills, just that your civilian skills might not be as valuable to the military.
I send good thoughts your way on a regular basis, btw.
Yay, indeed. Surgery went well.
Mmm, that glass is half full… of single-malt scotch.
I helped my SO through bypass surgery. It was amazing to me how quickly someone can recover from heart surgery. Your friend is younger and in much better shape that Bill was, he will probably be out on the playing field in a year.
My rant: We are back in AZ. One of us needs to deal with paperwork on Monday. That same person also needs to put flowers on her mentor’s grave. Lolli was one of my best friends. She was always cheerful and upbeat. She ran our rescue group for 36 years. Lolli was the one who was always there when there was a critter who needed help.
She died a year ago tomorrow. On my birthday. While I think that is a good thing because I will never forget that day, I’m grumbly about it as well. When we buried her on the side of a mountain, with a lovely view and next to her husband, it had been snowing for a month.
We were knee deep in Arizona mud. It was horrible, cars were sliding off the road and people were falling and ruining their clothing. The service was short and sweet. We had the preacher service the next month.
This year, there has been no water falling from the sky until today. I understand that its snowing on Lolli and Steve’s graves. We are about 20 miles away and its raining hard.
Lolli would not want all of us slogging through the mud to leave flowers on her grave, be we are going to do it anyhow. There are a lot of people who miss her.
Thanks for the encouragement.
Thought: could you switch to putting flowers on Lolli’s grave on her birthday? If it’s less muddy then, I suspect that’s “what she’d want” (“I’m sensing a date… it’s sunny, your shoes aren’t sticking to the ground…”)
Thanks, Facebook friend and former classmate, for all the help you’ve given me getting into shape. It’s pretty handy having a professional trainer for the Department of Defense to answer all my fitness-related questions. You have even made several videotapes just for me demonstrating the proper way to do the exercises and helped me to avoid injury. Fan-fuckingtastic. But this morning you posted a mean joke about fat people that totally blindsided me. Oh, and then there’s the ‘‘fat people’’ collection album you have, of people I guess you thought were fat enough to warrant taking a picture of. What the hairy fuck is wrong with you?
He’s terrified of being fat. It defines his existence, even his own career choice.
Yup. He just admitted as much.
Second this.
I refuse to do death dates. I do not understand why people want to remember that.
I do birth dates for remembrances of those gone.
And if it gets you out of the snow & mud, bonus!
I think that Lolli would have wanted a homeless animal spayed or neutered in her memory. But if putting flowers on a grave makes you feel better, then do it.
Botheration and bugger. Laptop in the shop. Was trying to self-diagnose and repair whatever was causing the BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER issue, and in the process of trying to find the Windows memory check utility (which apparently only appears when you use your installation disk to do a system repair?), I managed to reinstall Windows and now Windows can’t find any of the networking devices so I can’t get back online.
At this point, I’ve given up trying to figure it out myself. I took the laptop and the backup drive (Acronis True Image, and I’ve got a back-up that’s only a week or so old, so I’ll lose very little) to the shop, and here’s hoping they can get it fixed SOON.
I used to be good at figuring out and fixing this stuff, so I’m pitting not only the damned error that was making my computer BSOD, but the stupid interface design that caused me to reinstall instead of repair, the loss of the network devices, and my own general ignorance.
buggerbuggerbuggerbuggerBUGGER.
At least I’ve got my work laptop, so I’m not completely out of touch with the outside world.
I agree with you all so much, and this especially. Lolli wouldn’t have wanted us to do this. This wasn’t for Lolli as much as for all of the people who miss her. They are my friends, so I went for them.
When Lolli was in the hospital, I brought her flowers one time. She seemed very happy to get them, she was always very gracious, but later during the visit…she worried that I might be having problems feeding my fosters because she wasn’t calling around for free food for all of us.
I didn’t bring her flowers anymore. I asked her for a list of who to call and who needed food and took that job over for her, then I brought her milkshakes and pictures of my current fosters.
While we were sharing memories today, I learned that I’m not the only one with some lingering guilt about being thoughtless. Lolli never asked for anything for herself. Never. So, after she had been in the hospital for over 6 months…3 days before she died…I was visiting her and discussion went to my e-reader and how much I liked it.
Lolli said something about how she would like one because books were too heavy for her to hold. Then she said that she wished she had a laptop because she knew that she must have had a bunch of emails on the rescue site.
I went home, packed up my laptop and ordered Lolli a Kindle. The next day, Lolli took a turn for the worse and I couldn’t get in to see her. Her Kindle arrived the day she died.
How could I have not thought about that? :smack::smack::smack: How could none of us have thought about that? :smack::smack::smack: Lolli, darnit, why didn’t you say something??? Even if none of us owned a spare laptop, we could have pooled our money to buy you a new one. We would have been so happy to do something, anything to make you more comfortable.
Sorry, its been an emotional day.
Coincidently, I will be celebrating her birthday every year. We are getting married on Lolli’s birthday. Lolli was born on the 4th of July. How cool is that? We loved celebrating her birthday, sparklers on her cake, all of us in red, white and blue, fireworks in the warm evening.
digs, how is your friend doing? You might be able to go see him today. He might be kinda out of it, but he will probably remember you being there. His room probably has a white board for the nurses to write notes…you can write a note there if he’s sleeping.
Bill has forgotten a lot about those horrible days, thank goodness. He does remember who visited him, and he remembers me pointing at the white board and telling him that someone had come in while he was asleep.
I understand, you have to be with the others who remember her.
Thank you. I am now pitting time changes. I’m just barely getting used to Texas time, but today made me get up earlier. Bill took a nap after the grave thing, now he’s awake and I’m about ready to go to bed.
Its going to be very good to be on the same time as Bill…but how do you folks deal with the cats when the time changes? I know that they will be happy to get fed earlier…but do they try to chew your face off when its late?
My cats don’t chew my face off when food is an hour later. They just stand by my chair and whine. For an hour.
He’s amazing. Got out of triple bypass and as soon as he was off the ventilator, he texted me: “I’m alive!” A little later, he was making bad puns. He wanted to rest today, but asked his buds to raise a glass of his favorite whisky at the Irish Pub we gather at on Friday nights. So we did!
Thanks for asking! (Wow, I got a shout out from The Nemesis of the Rat King…)
Well…thats not promising.