Yesterday Walter and I drove back from Gatlinburg, Tennessee in the beautiful sunshine.  It was a happy drive and a great way to end the best week ever.

Seriously.  Honeymoons are fun and everyone should have one.

Except for falling out of the hot tub.  You should skip that part.  I’ve got a nice bruise on my elbow and another on my side.

EXHIBIT A

EXHIBIT B

(pardon the poor quality of the images, the whiteness of my skin seems to blind even digital cameras and it lessens the actual beauty of the bruising)

I wish someone had warned ME to skip that part.  So now I’m warning all of you (don’t say I never did anything for you): not ALL of the advertised aspects of the Honeymoon are pain-free.

You see… the hot tub was one of those above ground/portable devices, and was a little taller than my legs (we can all see where this is going, right?  I wish I’d seen in time….) so when I was getting out of it I (stupidly) lifted my second leg out before my first foot was actually ON the porch.  And I nearly faceplanted into a metal deck chair and nearly broke my arm at the elbow.

Also Walter laughed at me mid-deathglide.  I guess I looked pretty ridiculous.  And I had a good long laugh about it (read: I WAS IN HYSTERICS) after the shock of almost breaking my arm wore off.

So we’re back, and I’m happy to be home – even with the bruises.  We’ve got some stuff to do today in Magee, but we’re taking our time about it.  (and when I say “we’re taking our time” it means we’re watching YouTube videos and playing Facebook games… OBVIOUSLY)  Eventually when I get my computer set up here at the house I’ll be able to share the pictures we took, but that won’t happen today.  Or even this week, probably, at the rate we’re going.

I have nothing else to say.

Also I can’t type.

What’s been going on around the Internets this past week while I was prancing about Pigeon Forge and falling out of high-tech swirly-pools?

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Looking for happiness is a quest that never ends.  There are so many different factors that add up to the sum of our happiness, and those same factors can usually also be subtracted as well, when things aren’t going right and the situation changes.  Being happy takes constant effort.  It takes more than simply existing to be happy.  There are things out there just waiting to get a person down.

Finding the things that bring me happiness can be a real chore.  Simple things are sometimes a huge struggle for me, and a lot of the people in my life still don’t understand that.  I’m often so negative about myself that it isn’t easy to see the good things, any good things.  I worry so much, about literally every single thing, that even good things get me down sometimes.

You might be thinking “Don’t worry so much!”, but it’s not that simple or easy.  And I hate when people say that to me, as if I choose to worry as much as I do.  Nobody wants this.

…

Let’s say I’ve got to go to the store for milk: before I go out the door I check two or three times to make sure I have my keys and my wallet (as if I’ve ever left the house without either them).  As I’m walking to my car I wonder if anyone is watching me and from the door to the car starts to seem like an abnormally long distance to have to walk.  Do I walk weird?  I may try to walk casual or even bouncy.  Will anyone that might be watching think I’m happy because of the bounce in my step?  I get in my car and buckle up, I think to myself that I should have checked behind my car because last summer I backed over John’s bike on accident because he left it in the middle of the driveway.  But I don’t get out and check.  I just back out slowly, hoping there is nothing there to run over and hoping that no one is watching just in case I back over a toy.  Is anyone watching me?  Do I look like I’m wondering if someone is watching me?  Do they remember that I accidentally backed over a bicycle?  Are they thinking about that too as I’m here in my car backing out of my parking spot?  I’m really bad at backing out, almost as bad as I am at parking (I’m wicked bad at parking, FFR).  Do I look casual, or do I look like I’m thinking about it too hard?  I try to look casual as I pull out into the street and head to the store (that I can see from my second story apartment window).  At the stop light I wonder if the person in the car across from me is going to turn, too, even though their blinker isn’t on.  What if they are turning and they just don’t ever use their blinker?  It’s not my fault if they get upset because I didn’t know they were turning, and if their blinker is broken they still shouldn’t get upset with me because MY blinker is on and I’M following the rules of the road.  Why don’t some people use their blinkers?  It’s what they’re there for!  This makes me angry every time I’m on the road.  And why don’t people come to a complete stop at Stop signs?  I wish there was a cop parked at every stop sign in town so people would pay more attention to what they were doing.  The light turns green and I make a right, watching that other car out of the corner of my eye and wondering if they think I look paranoid.  Then I take a left and I’m at the store.  I hope I’m not parked too close to anybody.  I really suck at parking.  Inside the store there’s a shelf in the cooler with four rows of whole milk.  Which row should I take it from?  Does everyone grab it from the same spot?  Do I want to be like everyone else?  Am I taking too long to look at the milk?  Is there someone back there in the cooler that can see what I’m doing and can tell that I’m thinking too hard about the milk?  I loved working in the milk cooler, taking out any of my frustrations on the stacks of crates of milk, organizing them.  I think about how much I miss milk delivery days and grocery days at the store in town.  I miss working at my store (it’ll always be my store), not this one.  I hated working this store.  At the counter is a person I don’t know who probably has no idea that I used to work for the same company and that after almost 4 years I could still operate the cash register with my eyes closed.  Does it matter, though?  No one stays working here for long, they never do.  I get my milk in a bag because I don’t like putting it on the floor and getting the bottom of the jug dirty, and I can’t stand putting it on the seat without the protection of a plastic bag.  I go back out to my car, milk in hand, and I wonder if I look like I know what I’m doing.  I wonder if they can tell I was just thinking about how much better I am at their job than they are.  I drive home feeling a little more confident because I got my gallon of milk on the seat in a bag and I’m better at someone’s job than they are.  I do the same thing at the light that I did before, probably accusing everyone silently of not using their blinker while I wait for the light to turn green and hoping that the person behind me doesn’t get to close to my car with theirs because what if something happens and I have to back up a few feet?  The entire ordeal, from getting in my car to getting back to the house lasts no more than 6 or 7 minutes.  I always always look at the clock.  I feel relieved when I walk in the door, even thought I don’t understand why I’d be tense going to the store.  If it takes more than ten minutes I get irritated.  I don’t know why, maybe because it shouldn’t take so long to get one thing from the store I can see from my living room window?  I don’t know.

But that’s just on a sunny day.  Throw rain or snow into the mix and I’d be a small mess.  I wouldn’t go for milk unless I absolutely had to.  And that’s a regular-every-day-type thing, isn’t it?  Going to the store for milk?  There’s no adventure in that.  I kind of wonder if anyone is still reading this because it’s so long and pointless, but I guess I don’t care really.  I’m too depressed by my own behavior, just thinking about it.  I guess I’m always at least a small mess, and I’m always wondering if people can tell.

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I’m going to tell you this story about how I hijacked a van when I was a wee child, somewhere around ripe old the age of 5 or 6.

Not to be confused with the time that same year I had decided to see what smoking a cigarette was like when my mom left one burning in the ashtray of the old blue Chevette in the driveway at The Gray House to run back into the house to grab something, and thought I would die but hid my discomfort because I didn’t want to get in trouble as she came back out and got in the car to take me to I Don’t Remember Where.  Yeah.  Not to be confused with that day.

We were in the van – I don’t remember who’s van it was – in the driveway of my grandparents’ new house (( at least I’m pretty sure that’s where we were… I think… )) with both of my sisters, Alli and Sarah, and our cousin Jerin.  I don’t know how I got the notion in my head that pulling the lever next to the steering wheel was a good idea (( come to think of it now, there might have been a lit cigarette involved here, too )), but I did it and suddenly we were in what I now know to be ‘neutral’ and the van was slowly rolling backwards.

Toward the street.

I was crying in the front seat while Sarah and Jerin were panicking, and Alli was “reading” a Winnie The Pooh or Where’s Waldo? book – completely oblivious to what was going on the entire time.

Where were the grown ups, you ask?  And why were we children often left unattended in vehicles?  Well, I’ll tell you.

It was the late 80’s.  There were no rules about leaving children or pets unattended in vehicles for any period of time (( or wearing seat belts, for that matter )).  I mean really, how much trouble could 4 kids aged 11 and under get into while waiting in a van in the driveway?

Quite a bit, the grown ups learned, as my uncle ran around the back of the van to try and stop it from rolling into the road.  I’m pretty sure Sarah jumped out too and was trying to help him, but I was in full on panic mode by that point (( what can I say, I started early )) and all I remember from between fits of sobs is that a) Alli in all her 4 year old glory was still oblivious to what was going on, and 2) I was terrified that my sister and uncle were getting sucked under a gigantic moving vehicle and it was all my fault.

Oh, and I think the front driver side door was open beside me.

That’s a lot for a small child.

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Maven posted a blog earlier this week titled Maven and The Case of the Peeping Tom turned Homicidal Maniac, and the comment I was about to leave was entirely too good to be a comment for just Maven to read.  So I decided to blog it here instead.  It’s so good, I want everyone to read it.

Read Maven’s blog here to get where I’m coming from with this.  She is the master of awesome.

…

I am the leaper afraid of the toe monster under the bed.  You know, the one with the sharp teeth and scary claws that you’re sure is going to take a swipe for your footsies?  Once the lights go out, I’m all knees and elbows trying to get into my bed.  I’ll destroy anyone’s limbs or face if it’s in the way of my scramble for safety (because blankets are the perfect picture of safety, right?).  I blame my mother for chasing me with the vacuum on several occasions during the course of my childhood.

In fact, if I’m ever being chased by anyone or anything, I run like the hounds of Hell are on my heels and my toes are going to get swallowed forever.  For similar reasons, I also don’t like when people are walking behind me.  If I’m with a group of people, you can bet your ass I’m one of the ones in the back of the group while we walk.  At work I have a mirror positioned just right against my window so that I can see anyone walking into or by my cubicle.

I’m not sure if I have any “secret” fears, but I do have some that make me act quite… irrational I guess you could say.

It’s happened a few times that I’ve been convinced my house was being robbed and I was going to have to defend myself (most likely has nothing to do with the fact that one time I was robbed, and probably everything to do with my paranoia and active imagination and anxiety).

When I was living in my grandmother’s house I kept a dagger in my bedroom.  A real one.  Ornate and sharp.  If anyone asked me about it I could say ‘oh this old thing?’ and tell them it was just decorative.  Well, this one time in particular, probably about three years ago now (shutup), Alli and I were in our bedroom in the basement at our respective computers, where we always were (always).  We were just sitting there doing our gaming thing when we heard someone come in the house.

Everyone else was at work or school, and it wasn’t time for them to be home yet.

This someone was walking around kind of slow.  Having lived in the basement for quite some years we had each developed this really precise knack for knowing exactly who’s footsteps we were hearing.

(Come to think of it now, it’s really more of a science or an art what we’d developed over the years.  But anyway…)

This one, we knew right away, was one set of footsteps that shouldn’t be in our house.

It was a man.  It wasn’t any man that was supposed to be in the house.  Instantly we’re both in full on panic mode.  We thought we would be able to hide in our super secret basement bedroom until this stranger left, because the back door makes far too much noise for us to leave unnoticed.

Living together for more than two decades, we’d learned to communicate with our eyes.  Sort of.

Silently we each grabbed some kind of weapon, just in case, you know?  There was always a weapon handy in case of emergencies like this.  Since my dagger was all the way on the other side of my room I picked up this bow and arrow set from when I was a kid that was actually pretty dangerous (way more dangerous than any toy you can get these days) and Alli grabbed the piece of the refrigerator that was on the floor on her side of the room (don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to).  The door at the top of the stairs opened, and in a state of fierce confidence that can only come from utter terror, we waited behind our door as the footsteps came down the stairs.  We counted in our heads.  13 steps in total to reach the bottom.  Just before the footsteps reached the basement floor, we whipped open the door and prepared to assault…  my mother’s boyfriend.

The poor guy.  And we thought we were scared!  Imagine you’re doing a simple favor for your girlfriend only to find yourself an inch away from getting assaulted with a deadly missile weapon and part of an old refrigerator.  By these two weirdos…

This is a story I’ll be telling my grandchildren.  It’ll be one of those ‘beware or you’ll end up like granny’ stories.  I just know it!

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