It’s been a whirlwind 2 weeks.

Hubby came home on R&R on the 11th …

The Friday before, I spent most of the day with his aunt in Austin – apartment hunting for her and my very first visit to an IKEA store. On Saturday, I spent the day scouring the places in the house that hadn’t seen scouring for a while … places like window screens, etc. I was exhausted Saturday night, but managed to sleep well enough to be in good shape on Sunday when he landed.

He’s been WoW starved, so he spent a great deal of time these last 2 weeks in-game. We managed to get out a little – camping one night, eats here and there, a drive to BLORA (where the campsite was), a visit to Michigan to see his family (surprised the beejesus outta all of them too) … it was a jam-packed week. The house looks like a tornado passed through.

I’ve been lazy these 2 weeks – instead of picking up after ourselves I let things slide because I wanted to maximise the time I had with him … some people would cringe and label me a bad housewife, but frankly I don’t care because I got to spend so much time with him that this is what he had to say after leaving:

That’s gotta make anybody smile.

Now that the whole 2 weeks are done and gone … I realize I feel like I’ve been run over. I ache in odd places, I am exhausted, the house is WAAAAY too quiet, the kittehs are sad … and the whole place just seems bleak. Even the damn weather is reflecting the mood.

The good part is I have a couple new toys to keep me busy for a few days whilst I get past the worst of this:

And the iPhone4 which arrived here on the Monday after hubs did.

Already the impact of the Nikon is obvious:

This is the latest Mission24 assignment – Burn. It’s the roasting fork hubs used to burn his hotdogs when we camped a couple weeks ago. I know … corny and a bit lame, but I’ve been out of practice. Bear with me, nuh?

Work has been a joke today … I haven’t been able to focus as well as I’d like today. Maybe I need a nap. Maybe I just need to push through the essentials and leave the frills for tomorrow … maybe I just need to try harder …

/sigh

Whatever … this post is already too long.

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This week is quite easily one of the worst weeks yet, in this deployment – for dozens of reasons.

Today, though, I was brought face-to-face with a very obvious fact. My friends love and appreciate me. It even seems as if 2 in particular are tag-teaming because one takes up the slack that the other leaves when their own lives call on them and I am finding myself without too many moments of utter despair and loneliness.

Thanks guys – you know who you are.

As for why this week has been the worst, I can’t really explain. It started with the flowers arriving and kind of climaxed with the disposal of said flowers when they finally died over a week later. It’s like a dam broke and ….

I just miss him.

Really badly.

And it hurts more this week than it has in the last 7 weeks. Maybe I just wasn’t dealing with it before, or maybe this is something new … and it doesn’t matter – at least I am attempting to face it.

/sigh

Tough as hell … house feels empty and barren; I feel lost and purposeless and without focus; and the brain is in hibernation – because simple things have become complicated and complicated things just plain impossible. Simple things like making a grocery list. Complicated things like …. work things. I made a monster mistake yesterday – one I wouldn’t have made normally. One that has me mortified.

Right now, I just want to go to sleep and wake up when it’s all better… considering it all, that would work out to be sometime in April of next year.

/sigh

All in all … it would be a hundred times worse if it weren’t for you guys who are there for me – even when I don’t think I need it.

So, thank you … all of you.

I appreciate you.

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This just arrived on my doorstep.

I am speechless and crying.

Happy crying .. “miss him” crying.. OMG-I-feel-SO-LOVED crying …

I love you, hon. Thank you.

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If you asked me what the trigger was for walking down memory lane today, I don’t think I could tell you. I started with when I first started playing WoW, scrolling through old screenshots of me in-game in those early days. Those triggered some bad memories, because the people with whom I played with at first are no longer a part of my life. It wasn’t so much the fact they were now persona non grata, but more the how of that fact that was sad. The better memories came when I stumbled on old screenshots of myself and hubby in-game.

You see, it was in the World of Warcraft that I “met” my now husband. And quite soon after I began playing the game in the first place. We “met” during a random encounter in-game. He was rude to me and I was rude back at him. Throughout the encounter, however, I realized that I liked his style — he wasn’t your usual typical senseless, stupid kid. He seemed to actually be a mature adult. So after said encounter, we agreed to hang around together some more.

From then on, we were practically inseparable – in-game that is. And when a couple months later he told me that he was going to be gone for a long period of time, I thought to myself “now why in heck would he think he needs to tell me that?” It was a long time for me before I registered that this was a real person behind the cartoon game character. I just never cared to find out more about this person. To be perfectly honest, my own life was as full as I intended to ever make it. I had experienced a great deal of drama and trauma in my personal life up to this point, and I had just about had it with people in general. So the fact that he was an actual person with whom I interacted regularly was beyond me … much less someone whom I would end up caring for and loving.

It wasn’t until much MUCH later that he said something to me that caused the ka-ching to happen in my head… something that indicated to me that while all I was doing was a mechanical kind of interaction, something was going on for him on his side … that he had made some kind of step forward whilst I sat back, stuck in that initial phase. It occurred to me that a fun dalliance with an nameless, faceless person might just be the thing I needed to get my head out of the doldrums – to enjoy life again. Even then, it never once occurred to me that it was going to be real, or that it would get much further than a few fun encounters.

Events followed that led to this day in a convoluted series of events that when I think of them now, I wonder how in HELL we got so lucky. The variables were stacked staggeringly against us almost every step of the way – from the cost of frequent visits to his profession and it’s restrictions among other things. Even our own stubbornness and resistances seemed to work against us.

Frankly, I look back and realize just how remarkable that we came to be together anyway. There was so much that we had to deal with to get here… not the least of which was age, cultural and professional differences. Yet somehow, we managed to get here. And here is somewhere so blissful.. so bright .. so shiny..

Every single day, every conversation I have with the other wives, I realize just how different we are, how lucky we are, how blessed we are, how open and how functional we are … how happy and how healthy we are. And happy isn’t even the right word … because we have our moments when happy is just not it. We get angry, we are sad, we are frustrated and worried and scared.. and we are all those things together. I’d say that beyond happy, we are content, satisfied.

I would have to say that is probably one of the greatest feats of all time – being content.

And the single most remarkable fact in all of this is that …. it all started in a game. And yes, even after all this time, it still makes me go “hmmm”

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This week is shaping up to be rather productive. After a loving pep-talk from the hubby, I decided to forcefully take back my time. Enforce my boundaries, organize my time and insist that everyone around me march to my tune.

Ok, ok – maybe not so much … but with a little help from specific people and suggestions, I managed to re-capture my time and am now working to keep hold of it. It’s easy to say: “here are my boundaries, please respect them” it’s a whole new deal to actually maintain and respect them yourself. So I have been attempting to get up at 6:30 every morning and start the day.

What I’ve been trying to do, also, is get some things out of the way too before I even sit down to work – things like, making breakfast (including my pot of tea), scooping litter (probably going to have to scoop twice a day now with 2 kitties), starting laundry (if there is any to start), etc. It helps to actually get up and get dressed too. That way the routine of washing my face and getting out of what I slept in and putting on something else gives my body the idea that I am starting my day.

I discovered something else about me yesterday too … talk about intense people? I tend to get VERY intense. It shows in my work. Yesterday, I worked in an intense frenzy from 6:30 until about 1:00pm – at which point I had to take a break I was exhausted. Which means that I need to watch myself, slow down some, pace myself better. On mornings like this one, I can do the frenzy for the first hour whilst I get the newsletter out. Then take a break (like I am now) and slowly deal with the rest of my list. This is how I believe I burned out of corporate life so quickly. I didn’t pace myself well at all – so I was always burning myself out during the mornings and boring myself to tears in the afternoon. After a while, that gets really tiring… exhausting either. The kind of exhausting that sits in your bones and weighs you down.

This morning, I am slowing down so much I decided to unplug the ‘puter and take it outside in the backyard – sit on the “patio” and work in the morning sun and breeze.

It’s nice here in the mornings. It’s cool (about 75 this morning), sun is pretty and not yet hot as all hell. Birds are always plentiful anyway and the sky is blue and pretty … one problem … the bugs. I think I just had a twice-larger-than-usual wasp fly by me. I admit, I shrieked .. then looked around to see if anyone heard me. I hate bugs. I think it’s probably time I went into the shed and hauled out the bug lamp. I know during the day is wasting energy, but bugs are out in the daytime too – aren’t they? ugh

Last night I had a moment – I walked into the closet to put up clean clothes and decided to bury my nose in hubby’s clothes. BAD IDEA. The tears started … I could feel them pricking behind my eyes – just wanting to come out. I felt the emptiness of him being gone so acutely that it hurt my chest. I wanted to curl up and cry. Instead, I pushed my chin up, finished putting up the clothes, shut the closet door firmly, dived into the shower and scrubbed myself neck to toe (including the callouses on the soles of my feet), warmed up dinner, ate and chatted to Mistikhal and DJ … Ha!

Cam – 1; sadness – 0! Take THAT! Booyah!

I had been warned about episodes like that. That they would be sudden and unpredictable and that they would take me completely by surprise. Granted, it was my bad to go stuffing my nose in his clothes, but still – I never expected to almost break down. I just expected that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you encounter something familiar.

That’ll teach me! /sigh

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