I'm a One-Job Kind of Gal

I really enjoy my job at the seminary. I enjoy it so much that I've decided to make it my only job. Despite the steep learning curve, I feel like I'm totally crushing it. It helps that my co-workers are very kind, patient, and encouraging, and the students are respectful. When I'm done at the seminary for the day, I leave feeling energized.

I took this photo in order to include it in a monthly report for work, trying to capture the new images Neil (on the left) and my boss (not pictured) had printed to hang on the walls. Neil and Tanner got in the way, however, so I just took their photo. They're such good guys. So young, but such good guys. There were no students in the building, so they're not wearing masks. I just want to clarify that they do wear masks when students are in the building, as that can get a person into serious trouble these days.

Working a full day at the seminary and then rushing off to drive afternoon bus runs was just too much, however. Oddly, learning this new job has not been stressful, even though I've had so much to learn; but being a sub driver comes with a certain degree of uncertainty about where you're going, who you're driving, and what possibly unpleasant surprises you'll encounter. The problem with adrenal fatigue is that even small and simple stresses aren't handled well by the body. I have very little tolerance for mental stress anymore, which is annoying. The mental stress of being a sub driver--though it's a small stress, to be sure--meant that I was not sleeping well at night, my brain zipping around in my skull like a hyperactive toddler while I was pleading with it to calm down and be still. Consistently poor sleep makes doing both jobs more and more of a mental and physical burden. Driving a bus while exhausted is not a good idea.

When I told Griff, my seminary boss, that I was giving up the bus driving because it was just too much, he nodded his head and said, "Yeah, well, the worst that could happen if you make a mistake here is that we have to fix a file. It wouldn't actually end up killing a student or anything."

I agree. I should stick with the job that carries the least possibility of killing students.

I also factored into my decision the worry that I'm not seeing Little Gary enough. We're homeschooling him again this year because his migraines are still coming on very frequently--sometimes daily, despite our efforts to figure out how to stop them--and I'm too exhausted when I get home to spend the quality time with him that I need to. Better to get home earlier and not be too exhausted to spend time with him. Despite his headaches, however, he has maintained his passion for history and has created some very well researched PowerPoints on World War I and World War II. Little Gary knows so much about those particular wars that I go to him when I have questions.

Joseph, my 16-year-old, is doing really well, which is a relief. He decided to attend high school this year as a junior (11th grade), and his school counselor is working with us to help him get enough credits to graduate with a high school diploma in two years. It means he's doing a full school schedule plus a few extra classes online. He's getting the rhythm of it, and he's keeping up. I'm so proud of all he's been doing to learn how to cope with his anxiety and his determination not to let it beat him. He's making friends at school, and he also applied for and got a Saturday job at the local bakery, which is putting money into his bank account for private driving school classes. Fortunately, he's not bringing any donuts home, like Gabrielle used to do when she was working there. I do not need the temptation of fresh, delicious, tender bakery donuts in the house.

Joseph, just before his recent haircut. 

Elannah has been enjoying life in Southern Utah. She got a full-time job as a front desk clerk at a hotel, and that makes her feel a lot more financially secure (and it means we get a steep discount on a room if we want to go visit her!). She has also made some really good friends among her roommates and with kids in her FHE group and Institute class. She isn't a partyer, but she has a lot of fun.

Elannah started dating a lovely young man just before she moved, and they like each other so much that they're doing the long-distance relationship thing. He's gone down to visit her, and they spend all their time together when she makes the drive home. Dalton is a super young man. He's smart, steady but fun, and he adores Elannah.

They make a cute couple.

Elannah and Dalton

Sophia is still dating her gentle-giant physical trainer boyfriend, Matt. They've been together for two years now. There's talk of a pending proposal. Matt is a great guy, despite his insistence on growing the occasional mustache and goatee. For his birthday, we bought him a cast iron frying pan, and he was so excited. You know a guy is mature when getting a cast iron pan to use in his kitchen (in the house he owns) makes him happy. The only serious difference of opinion between Matt and Sophia is on how he wants to decorate his bedroom. Sophia has stated emphatically that she will not be able to live with black walls covered in red paint splatter. He can do that in his basement Man Cave, but she doesn't want to wake up to that every day.

They're in negotiations.

Matt and Sophia

Sian, Nathan, and my darling grandson, Tyler, are doing well. Nathan got a good full-time job, and he's also attending another year of college. They're happy, and my grandson is, of course, adorable and smart and hilarious and perfect.

You can see his mischievous self in that raised eyebrow and little smirk, can't you?

Nathan, Tyler, and Sian

Gabrielle and Raine are plugging along, as well. They adopted one of my parents' cats, and the cat, Midnight, is very loved and gets plenty of snuggles and pettings on Gabrielle's lap (not that Midnight wasn't happy at my parents' house, where she was also loved and petted). Raine found a full-time job in the automotive department at a newly built Costco, and Gabrielle is still doing the workload of seven women, trying to fulfill the sometimes impossible promises made by the salesmen she works for. She is scouting for another job, however, as working for salesmen is a terrible deal for anyone other than the salesmen: they promise the moon to the customers--essentially dropping a bomb onto their fulfillment teams--and then spend a lot of their time congratulating themselves on their sales successes by golfing and refusing to do one iota of extra work to help clean up their messes. Been there, done that. I told Gabrielle to get out now before the whole company implodes. She heartily agrees. Her stress levels are almost unbearable, despite the cat.

Husband built a new deck onto the back of our house over the summer. The old one that came with the house was poorly built, so Husband did the research, bought the supplies and equipment (so much more expensive now than a few years ago!), and put up one himself, with the help of his dad and Joseph. All that remains to be done is staining/protecting the wood and putting up a little privacy lattice, as our back yard faces the street behind our house, and all the people living in those houses can see right into our yard from their front windows. It makes me feel very exposed, so I don't spend a lot of time hanging out in the back yard. This deck is so nice. I'm so proud of Husband for doing such a great job.

Husband and Joseph putting on the final touches. 

You're still here? I'm impressed and gratified!

In case you were wondering, yes, I'm still losing weight. I'm down about 25 pounds total now since the beginning of June. That's not a lot of weight lost given the time frame, but there was a vacation in there where it took a couple weeks to get fully back on track, and I occasionally eat too much pizza. But otherwise, I am very much still loving the keto/intermittent fasting approach. I was eating only one meal a day, which was easy, but I realized I wasn't eating enough in the day, so I added a small high fat/high protein mini-meal for lunch, and that seemed to speed up the weight loss process immediately. I'm all for eating more in order to lose weight!

Ok. That's it for now. I hope you have a wonderful day!

Thinking Out Loud: My Deepest Fears

A few days ago, I was a bit down. Nothing too big. Just one of those days when my anxieties get a little loud in my head and I start fearing that what I normally know is irrational is actually true.

In this case, the anxiety that got loud was that there is nothing likable about me, and that people who are friendly are really just pretending. I had the very real urge to go home and develop a severe case of agoraphobia.

There had been a couple less-than-stellar interactions with some people in the course of what I was doing in the day (though the vast majority of interactions were positive), and I was tired and let my guard down; so the Demon On My Shoulder (DOMS), who is assigned to get at me through any chink in my armor (think The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis), had a bit of a field day stirring up these particular deepest fears of mine.

So irritating. DOMS is a real pest. It really hates me, and it uses any opportunity to skewer me in my most emotionally tender parts.

Rationally, I know that while I'm not everyone's cup of tea, most of my interactions with others will be pleasant ones--whether those interactions are with family, friends, or strangers--because I am going to approach those interactions with the best of intentions. I am genuinely interested in making others' days as pleasant as I possibly can through my actions, and I am going to think the best of you unless given good evidence to the contrary. Despite my introverted nature, I often strike up conversations with strangers, and we smile together and sometimes laugh in the few seconds or minutes that our paths cross. In that moment there's a little bond, a little golden cord of good faith that is created between two people who may never meet again but who have shared a tiny meeting of hearts. For me, it's a boost. I hope it makes the other person's day a little smoother, too. When that meeting of hearts happens with friends and family, it's my lifeline. It's just about the most important thing in the world to me. That is why the opposite of this--that I am mistaken in this meeting of hearts and that I am only a burden and a torment to those I love, that they only pretend to like me because they know telling me they really can't stand me would crush me--holds so much terror for me. It sounds really stupid when I say it out loud, but it feels overwhelming when it's just in my head.

The one good thing that comes of DOMS's torments is that I know far better what my deepest fears are, and when you can name a fear, it has less power over you. It does mean thinking through the pain of the fear, sorting out what is rational from what is irrational, and that is hard, no lie. On that particular night, as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, my brain spun scenario after scenario that illustrated this particular deepest fear even while I mentally rolled my eyes and told myself it was all exaggerated silliness.

(The next day, I mentioned some things out loud in a group concerning this fear, and that prompted my friend, Linnea, to send me a little video message telling me that she thinks highly of me. I hadn't been fishing (and I had a momentary stab of guilt that maybe she felt obligated to send that message because of how pathetic I am--see? it's always a fight!) but I was very grateful for the fact that she took time to tell me that. It's still making my heart warm.)

Is it normal for the rational and irrational sides of your mind to battle things out like that, where I can consciously feel both the rational and irrational sides square off in my mind? I know some people don't have internal dialogues, which is hard for me to imagine. Would it be blessed silence not to be mentally talking to myself all the time?

The fear that I am a burden is a sub-fear of an even larger fear, the biggest, deepest fear I have: that I am actually, literally, worthless. Ugh. Don't even get me started on how annoying that one is to deal with. I have missed so many opportunities because I've believed that fear.

I tell you this not because I'm looking for sympathy but because someone else may have the same experience and need to know they're not alone. I blame DOMS for stirring up those fears so hard that my life stutters a bit as I deal with them. Everyone has a DOMS, whether you want to think of that demon as literal or figurative. I find that if I can (figuratively) point to DOMS and say, "This is you, you beast. This is not truth. You are trying to stop me from doing or being what I'm supposed to do or be," it helps take the edge off the fear. You can separate yourself--your identity--from the fear and think of it as Other, Not You. It is not who you are, and, therefore, it doesn't have to have power over you.

I hope that makes sense. I'm no expert, obviously, or I would have banished all my fears by now. Or, maybe it's that I'm human and can't banish all my fears, but I'm doing the best I can right now. And so are you.

I prayed about his fear. God told me it was not true, and He also said He would keep reminding me of that every time I asked.

Dr. Bukacek Was Right!

I love my new job. There's a lot to learn, and I'm frantically busy for the entire time I'm at work, but I love what I do, I love my co-workers, and I love helping students.

For the past two weeks, the school district has had the kids on early-out days, with Fridays being "remote learning days," where the students work entirely online. This means that, on Monday through Thursday, classes have only been thirty-five minutes long--not long enough to do hardly anything as far as teaching new concepts or getting into really good discussions of the subject matter. That changes next week, when classes will be run at normal times of seventy minutes per class. The teachers at the seminary are very excited for next week.

The one thing I hate about my job--the one thing--is the wearing of masks.

All the students have to wear masks, and so do we, of course. I, in my glassed-off office, take my mask off when no one is at my window speaking to me, and when the students are gone, all the faculty abandon masks altogether (and during the summer, none of us wore masks around each other at all).

Bus drivers have to wear masks while they are driving, which I find ridiculous. How is being oxygen-deprived while driving a large number of students around in a very heavy vehicle in any way safe? But I guarantee that if some Karen or Chad sees you driving without your mask fully on your face, the bus garage will get a phone call to complain. Never mind that the driver is facing away from the students and has nearly six feet of separation from the students sitting behind him or her. No, we should have drivers become sleepy and less reactive to appease the panicking public.

You know my opinion on the efficacy of masks to prevent influenza-type illnesses: it's like putting up a chain link fence to keep the mosquitos out. I've read the studies, studies on masks that were performed years before wearing a mask became a political trigger and a virtue signal. No amount of logical contortions by the media (and one of my own sons, who has become quite the left-of-center thinker) can convince me otherwise. Masks are useful in a tiny handful of situations, and this is not one of them. What they are effective for right now is to keep pushing everyone to be panicked about a virus that has not even met Koch's Postulates as a real, identifiable disease. No one has ever seen a Covid-19 coronavirus virus. It has never been isolated.

Never mind, for now, that the WHO changed its own definition of a pandemic to allow this nearly non-existent threat to be classified as an actual pandemic.

What I want to talk about is this: DR. ANNIE BUKACEK WAS RIGHT!

The Covid-19 death statistics were being deliberately skewed upward, with the result being an economic disaster that will affect us for years. She was lambasted, threatened, and name-called for speaking the truth: that the CDC was adamantly instructing that doctors list just about any death as a Covid-19 on the death certificates.

The CDC just admitted that only six percent (6%!) of deaths attributed to Covid-19 were actually attributable to only Covid-19. Less than 10,000 people in the United States have died of only Covid-19. The other 96% of deaths had one or more co-morbities that killed them, with the majority of people who died also being aged above 65, many of whom were in nursing homes.

I'm not discounting that people died. People do die, though. Everyday. Some die after a long and fruitful life, and some die tragically young. I will die someday, too. Hopefully, I will be missed by someone after I die. But, to me, it is a desecration to use someone's death as a reason to falsely frighten and panic the living into complying with draconian and tyrannical measures that cause more harm than they will ever cause good. If my death were used in that way, I would make it my personal after-life's goal to haunt the people responsible for using my death as a weapon. You think I'm being flippant? I'm not. I would not "go towards the light" until I had scared the living crap out of those sociopaths.

Obviously, this whole pandemic thing is about more than forcing people to wear masks and social distance. This experiment and all-too-successful trial will help usher in far worse tyrannies: the eventual domination of the "healthcare system" over all aspects of our lives, including our privacy, our money and our monetary and financial transactions, our bodily autonomy, our ability to travel freely, our relationships with other people, and our ability to make any personal choices for ourselves.

Think I'm exaggerating? Then you're not reading deeper than the headlines. You're not extrapolating into the future the consequences of the draconian measures that The Authorities have promised us are part of The New Normal, or, as it is also called, The Reset, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There are truly evil people who want to control us all, and we're handing them our collecctive heads on a big silver platter.

Sigh. But you know my opinions. You may agree, you may think I'm a loony. I just want people to think!

But in this time of Covid, I am fortunate that I love my job and the people I work with. I find a great deal of joy in my work.