News from the Great Beyond

A Day in the Life

Due to the wild popularity (snerk) of my 2004 "day in the life" account, I thought it may be interesting to relate what an average day looks like for me right now.   At least, I'll find it interesting.  Perhaps a few of you will be amused or entertained.

4:30 AM:  First alarm goes off.  I reach over to the nightstand and stab the "OK" button on my phone to acknowledge and shut up the obnoxious beeping.  Get up and go to the restroom.  Having not gained full consciousness, I fall back onto the bed and immediately drift off again.

4:50 AM: Second alarm goes off.  Explain to the cell phone alarm just how displeased I am with the fact that I have to wake up when it's still dark.  Sit up in bed and begin stretches.  Stumble around the bedroom in the dark and locate my athletic shoes with socks stuck inside them (easier to do it that way than dig around for socks in the blackness of pre-5 AM with my non-morning-person hazy brain function).  Sit on the bed and put on socks and shoes while continuing to stretch.  Track down location of sports bra and put that on as well.  Whine some more.  Brush teeth, because I cannot stand to leave the house with that morning breath taste in my mouth.

5:05 AM: Grab car keys, phone, purse, and the book du jour (today it was Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) and get in the car to drive to the gym.  Back out of the garage and hit the garage door remote, which refuses to close the door.  Sigh heavily.  Get out of the car, walk into the garage and punch the wall control for the garage door.  Go into the house through the garage and back out the front door.  Get back in the car and sigh again.

5:07 AM:  Arrive at the intersection of my side street and the major east/west thoroughfare.  Flash high beams at the stoplight to try to trigger it to change.  Pull forward into the crosswalk.  Inch further forward, flashing high beams.  Finally trigger the stupid light change when my front tires are resting on the line at the far side of the crosswalk.

5:12 AM:  Pull up to the gym, a mile from my house. Sigh heavily.  Yawn.  Grab book and purse from the passenger seat, and pop the trunk before locking the car.  Dump purse in trunk.  Go back to car and get the towel from the front seat.  Claim a treadmill and set up the manual program for 20 minutes at a speed and incline that will give me a good heart rate for cardio (the computerized program insists it be able to measure my heart rate by keeping both hands on sensors, which makes it impossible to hold my book... plus it likes to reduce my speed and increase my incline which throws me off my rhythm).  Begin reading the book du jour.  Discover an impending pain in the left calf after 11 minutes and hit the "cooldown" button.  After cooldown, switch to the recumbent bike for 12 minutes.  Use towel to wipe off equipment and dripping forehead.  Return home.

5:50 AM: Park in front of the condo instead of fighting with the garage door opener again.  Round up clothing for the day.  Put athletic shoes with socks stuffed inside for tomorrow back against the closet door to be found in the dark.  Take shower and get ready for work.  Slip cranberry supplements and chromium picolinate in pocket to take with breakfast.  Double check to make sure I opened the chromium bottle and not the melatonin.  Falling asleep at work, not so handy.

6:25 AM:  Leave for work.  Have battle of wills with the stoplight at the intersection near my house again.  Sigh heavily.

Mr. Grumpypants and Other Fascinating Customers

So returns the "Work (ACK!)" category - for those who haven't been following my adventures on Facebook, back in mid-May I was interviewed and accepted for a temp-to-hire position at a local call center for a national mail order pharmacy. 

In keeping with my formerly stated anonymity principles, henceforth we shall refer to my prospective employer as MailOrderPharmacy#1 (we're #1 - yay!), or MOP#1 to save typing all that out.  Technically I'm still an official employee of the temp agency, but the supervisors at MOP#1 have stated their intention is to hire permanently everyone who makes it through the 90 day temp period and looks like they're getting the hang of it.

So far I'm pretty confident I'm getting the hang of it.  My job entails taking incoming phone calls of all sorts for the mail order prescription business - new prescription orders (we can take the information from the patient and fax their doctor to get an official prescription record in the files), refills of existing prescriptions, checking order status, taking payments on account balances, providing price quotes, explaining how this whole mail-order thing works anyway, and setting up new accounts.  I and my comrades are the first point of contact for customers who want their medication mailed to them, have received medication and don't know what it is, or haven't received it yet and are frantic to figure out what happened to it.

Not my words...

... but if I take the time to search for my own today, I'll pretty much be wrecked for the morning.

Our lives are given a certain dignity by their very evanescence.  If there were never to be an end to my quiet moments at the brook, if I could sit on the rock forever, I would not treasure these minutes so much.  If our associations with the people we love were to have no termination, we would not value them as much as we do.  Human love is an extraordinary gift, but like all flesh it is corruptible.  Death or distance separates all lovers.  My awareness of my husband is sharpened by impermanence.

Would we really value anything we could have forever and ever?

~ Madeleine L'Engle
from Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections

This is how I know God likes me. (UPDATED)

So yeah.  Since the last time I posted, I ran out of savings and found a job just in the nick of time (I had $200 that had to last me for 4 weeks before my mom and my grandparents pitched in to make sure I had enough to make it through to my first paycheck)....

After years of having two decent incomes, and then one more-than-sufficient income, and then a big chunk of life insurance to draw from (one year of Hubby-head's salary lasted me almost two years), I'm suddenly having to rearrange my budget around weekly paychecks.   I'd had all my bills scheduled or set to auto-pay from my online bill pay, and rarely needed to worry with changing the payment dates - a few bills I'd have to go in and schedule when to pay them, but most things happened like clockwork without me having to think about it.  It's been... an adjustment.

I'm not quite adjusted yet.  I managed to forget to reschedule my end of the month/first of the month bills to separate weeks, and when I went in yesterday to check on how I was going to arrange my payments with next week's short paycheck (*muttering about "holidays" as a temp*), I realized that I not only had overdrawn my account, I'd managed to have so many things hit at the wrong time that between the actual payments and the overdraft fees, my entire next paycheck is going to be sucked up by the negative balance.  Yay.

So yeah.  I had $4 and some change to live on for the next couple of weeks - thankfully one of those things that pushed my bank balance into the red was buying two weeks worth of groceries, but I did have a few necessities to pick up at the store and I wasn't looking forward to having to bum a ride from one of my coworkers if the gas tank ran too low... that kind of thing.

And then... I remembered the change jar.  Hubby-head's change jar, which was actually a 40 oz container he'd kept from a bulk package of Smart & Final roasted peanuts years ago.  Every night he'd empty his pockets on top of his armoire, or next to the computer, and in the morning he'd pick up the wallet, keys and dollar bills, and leave behind whatever change he'd picked up throughout the day.  We had piles of change all over the place, so I started collecting it on a regular basis and dumping it into the change jar.

Now and then when the budget was tight, I'd dig into the jar and pull out a few dollars worth of quarters to buy lunch or a couple of urgent grocery items.  Most of what was left in the jar looked like pennies and nickels, but I decided to take the jar with me to the grocery store and dump it into one of those Coinstar machines to see what I ended up with. 

Apparently I had over $110.00 in change sitting in my living room - who knew?  After the Coinstar counting fee and buying the stuff I went to the grocery store to get in the first place, I've got $85.00 left to cover me for the next two weeks.  More than enough... and man, do I feel blessed.

So yeah.  God likes me.

UPDATED 7/16!

I take that back... THIS is how I know God likes me! 

Sunday morning I received a text message from one of our outreach coordinators asking if I could stop on the way to church and pick up a case of bottled water to stock up for planned outreach activities... Of course, my phone is set to vibrate and I didn't even hear the text come in, so I picked it up at the tail end of service when I was checking the time on my phone.

After church, I mentioned to him that I just got the message, but I wouldn't have been able to afford to spend money on that for a couple of weeks anyway due to the aforementioned bank balance issues. 

As it turns out, his wife works for my bank.  And as it turns out, I got a text from him later that day asking me to message his wife with my account number, and she could reverse out the overdraft fees for me.

She ended up removing enough fees from my account that I'm back in the black - and yes, I did reschedule my payments appropriately to make sure that didn't happen again.

See?  God likes me.