It's all about me now...

I haven’t felt like writing – for a lot of different reasons, none of which are really relevant right now. In order to feel like writing again I had to think a lot about why I wrote, who I was writing for, and what I was writing. After all that thinking (wow, did I just smell burning batteries?) I decided that I was going to go back to just writing for me.

In a way, my blog didn’t even start out that way. I was always writing with someone else in mind – what would they think of me? The truth is - I don’t care. There has been so much going on in the past couple of months I haven’t written about that it makes me sad. Like the letter I got in the mail from some deranged republican who anonymously begged me not to vote for Obama. Or the phone call/confrontation with my Aunt Wanda regarding that letter where she denied sending it. Then I asked her, would she please leave me alone about my political beliefs – after all, I didn’t slam her email account with democrat propaganda… That little discussion still has fruit to bear since I’ll see her for the first time since then on Thanksgiving. Oh, the things I am thankful for this year!

And the holidays coming up. Ugh, the stress that’s creating this year. Seriously? My FIL wasn’t going to the cabin this year for Christmas because he was going to be on-call over the holiday – then he went and screwed it up (just joking) and traded Christmas for Thanksgiving. I’d already started making plans with my mom to go to her house on Christmas Day with my brother and two nieces. I haven’t seen them outside of a major family function in years and this is the first Christmas since my brother and his wife divorced. I just thought the whole thing would be nice. Anyway, we’ve got decisions to make. Rob, Matt and Lindsay all want to go to the mountains, Jake knows he may have to work Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas so he’s okay staying home – besides, the GF's family has invited us for Christmas dinner. I don’t want to go to the cabin because I’d already started making plans with my mom – oh, yeah… and I hate my mother-in-law…

Long story, that one. I got a call from her in September asking if I was going to send her some money. I owe her $600, all that's left of a rather large sum of money we owed her for putting a new engine in our car a while back. I started working $100 into our budget and then it just didn’t happen. I didn’t know what to do since talking to her is like talking to a television announcer or game show contestant – they don’t hear you and keep talking. So I did what I always do when life is too much for me. I bury my head in the sand and ignore the situation. Kind of like what I've been doing for the past month about my blog. She called a month later and left another message, this time saying that she hadn’t made me beg for the money when we needed it, she didn’t understand why she had to beg to get it back. Oh, damn! I felt like crap and still didn’t have the money to pay her back but it did decide to take some action rather than ignore the situation. I wrote her a letter outlining why I didn’t have the money, some of our current struggles and apologized for making her beg. I sent her a good faith check for $5. The outcome? Don’t know. She hasn’t called me, hasn’t talked to any family about it, and hasn’t cashed the check I sent her. I thought about sending her a letter saying that I’d be happy to send her another five or ten dollars if she’d just cash the first check I sent her, but that’s passive aggressive and I don’t want to go there.

That’s all for now but I’m going to make an effort to write regularly. I love the idea of having an online journal.