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Stories

I Died

The other night I had a dream that I was sitting at a picnic table with some friends and I got shot in the back. I started to die. I became so heavy and I felt like something heavy was on top of me, like a cow or something unmoveable had fallen on top of me.

In my dream I was scared, I didn’t want to die, I felt like I had so much more to do with my life. Then I woke up.

Most of the time details in dreams fade, but sometimes they don’t, sometimes they stay with you almost as if you actually lived that moment in reality.

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Stories

Renovation Junkie

I am literally DYING to pull all of my carpet out of my house and put in hardwood floors or just live on bare cement until I can afford hardwood floors.

Every day I long to rip out my kitchen cabinets, re-purpose the laundry room and totally gut the master bath.

When I am not thinking about the inside of of my house I am fixated on my lawn, the landscape, a new deck, and a flagstone walkway and firepit.

I have big dreams and ZERO budget and so I do the small projects I can and hope for is to do some small painting projects to soothe my restoration itch.

Last week I started to paint the master bedroom after scraping the ceilings twice, painting them with primer, then doing another light texture, another coat of primer and then finally painting them with a gallon of Behr Pure Premium Paint with Primer added in. Color choice? Bleached Linen. Wall Color? Oven Straw on 3 Walls and Macchiato on an accent wall. Problems? Multiple.

When I first scraped the ceilings I thought I would leave it lightly textured by just scraping it lightly. This is still extremely time consuming and messy. Then I started to paint the freshly scraped ceiling and it looked too gritty and so I used water and a slower scraping technique to remove every ounce of plaster down to the bare sheetrock. This is easily done if you use lots of water, time and elbow grease.

I rolled on the texture after the scraping which is necessary to hide the small gouges and nail holes that I had exposed from all the scraping, but before that I applied a layer of Primer because I thought I might just prime it and paint the ceiling and call it a day, but after priming it I realized it needed to be textured.

After I finished with the ceiling I tackled three walls at once and when it came to the cut-in around the top of the ceiling – the hardest part of the job – I realized only after I was finished that I had a paint that was the wrong color. It was so very close in color, but definitely a shade darker than the oven straw that I was using. Ugh.

I also removed the ceiling fan and bought a new one and in the end this simple paint project has cost me about $500 dollars and I didn’t even get around to the Master Bath which was also on my list for this project.

During this whole ordeal I have been sleeping on the couch and it has caused my whole house to turn into a construction zone that is quite the messy nightmare. I plan to remedy this problem today with a final painting of the master bedroom and then I am going to put my bed back in there and at least get some good sleep.

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Relationships Stories

And Then I Spewed Word Vomit like an Over-Pressurized Fire Hose

My friend Jimmy is in town from China and I am staying with him and his parents for a couple of days. The problem with having a close friend so far away is that when we finally get together there is soooo much to talk about. Did we cover this in an email already? Not sure, so let’s rehash it again.

Jimmy and I have lived together, worked at 2 different companies together, travelled to China together, worked as High School leaders at Denton Bible Churh and were even in Evangelism Explosion together when we were in High School. It’s been a long journey that has forged a friendship that has become more like family.

Now that I live and work alone I seem to have all sorts of information that just sort of builds up in me that I don’t have time to share through an email. Imagine going weeks and months at a time without really having a meaningful conversation with anyone. It’s easy to do because people are busy and you don’t just go sharing your doubts and fears and dreams with just anyone. So when I get around my friends that I know really care about what I have to say then I tend to just blab word vomit all over them. It comes gushing out in projectile streams that I can’t control.I apologize later and just like real vomit I feel so much better when I get things out of my system.

It’s been a good visit hanging with Jimmy while he’s in town. I think it is interesting how sometimes distance can actually grow a friendship. It makes you stop and take a moment when they are in town and you don’t ever take them for granted. I have friends that live just an hour away and I rarely spend the weekend with them and so our time isn’t focused quality time.

So if I haven’t seen you in a while and you can’t shut me up, then consider it an honor cause it means I count you as a close friend. One I could vomit on and we’d still be friends later.

Categories
Relationships Stories Technology

Sharing the Burden

A couple of weeks ago the server crashed at the nursing home where I do IT Consulting. I got a phone call while I was at the chiropractor that they had received a blue error screen and that none of them could log on to the computer. My heart sank.

A blue screen of death or BSOD in geek speak is never a good sign, but it is a VERY bad sign when that computer is your primary domain controller and without it the entire office is shut down. No internet, no logging on, no access to the database for payroll processing – nothing.

I worked 12 hours the first day trying to restore the server which was still using a 12 inch monitor circa 1995 and was housed in someone’s very busy office. Women kept streaming into the office checking on my progress, residents would poke their heads in and ask how I was doing, but I really needed them all to go away.

My college degreee is in Business Adminimistatrion but my background is in computers. I have an MCSE that I received in 1998 which is pretty much worthless now, but at the time was very valuable and it gave me the foundational understanding of computers and networking which I used to start my career in Information Technology.  An MCSE is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and I paid $9000 and 6 months of my life to SMU to earn that piece of paper.

Day two at the Nursing home wasn’t much better and finally I had to call Microsoft and get them on the phone to help. The pressure was building since this was Wednesday and on Friday I had to be in Oklahoma for a wedding and payroll had to be done the very next day in order for all the staff of the Nursing Home to get paid.

I was starting to get a little panicky because I had figured out how to get part of the server back up and running, but I couldn’t get the rest fixed because I wasn’t the one to set the server up. I had no idea how it was configured and since I had been working at the nursing home my job had mostly been to fix the day-to-day activities and not to delve into the interworkings of the network.

At about 3pm one of the ladies from the home said she could call a friend who might be able to sit on the phone with Microsoft and help me out if I needed it. His name was Brian and he arrived at about 4:00 p.m. while I was in the middle of a call with Microsoft.  Brian sat next to me and I relayed to him what was happening briefly.  I had setup a remote control session with Microsoft on a partition of the server that had access to the broken portion of the server and while the guy on the phone was on the other side of the world, he was a computer genius. He literally edited the hexidecimal code in order to fix the broken server. People, if you ever get a blue screen of death on a server do not try to fix it on your own, just call Microsoft and these guys can fix it! It was amazing.

During that call I had this unbelievable sense of relief come over me long before the technician had repaired the computer. In Brian I had sensed competency and confidence. I felt like he was someone I could rely on if this problem got out of hand and it was like someone had pulled the plug on an over-inflated air mattress that was crammed into my head.

This revelation sort of floored me. I’ve been a loaner most of my life relying on myself to get things accomplished and never really felt like I had someone that I could count on in a pinch – especially in the realm of IT and Networking. Not only that, Brian and I just sort of seemed to click. We talked the same language and when the situation was resolved I felt like in different circumstances we would have become good friends.

It was in these moments of stress that I realized that this is why God created Eve. He saw that Adam needed a helper, not because Adam wasn’t competent and completely able to handle everything himself, but because sometimes it is just nice to share the burden with someone else. There is something amazing about human presence and how it affects us all.

So if you are dealing with something, don’t try to go it alone. Get help. Share that burden.

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God Tragic

Binge Addiction | Struggling to Gain Control

“There are lots of reasons why stressed people might over eat or gamble or chase after hedonic rewards. Unfortunately this new result reveals another one,” said U-M psychology professor Kent Berridge. “People who feel bad during stress cope in part by overeating or pursuing other incentives.

“Now it turns out a stress chemical also activates the same brain mechanism that goes wrong in drug addiction to make us excessively want pleasurable things.” – (Click here to read full article)

While watching “Madea Goes to Jail” I heard a counselor on the show say, “She’s a binge addict, meaning she can go weeks, even a year without using and then suddenly start using as if she never stopped.”

When I heard this definition of Binge Addiction I realized that it describes me. I’m constantly under stress that is normally induced by overcommitting to employers, friends, family and myself. I have unrealistic expectations on myself and others and when I fail at meeting what is required of me, I go into a funk. These “Funks” normally last about a month and during that time I gain about 10 pounds. (What I need during these times is a nice place for  rehab where they understand that my privacy is important.)

I will finally get out of my funk and start an excruciatingly difficult routine that requires intense discipline in all areas of my life. I pull my crap together in such a way that for a short time I feel invincible. Things will be going swimmingly and invariably something happens. A few weeks ago it was getting hit in the eye with a racquetball racquet. It was a blow that not only rocked my face, it rocked my drive and determination. I was on the bench for three days and amazingly I bounced back. I got right back in the gym and started hitting the weights hard and running and doing my 3 hour workouts without fail. Things were going awesome and then 4 days into it I strained my back. CRIPES!

For 5 days I could barely walk without excruciating pain. Getting out of the car or off the couch took minutes instead of seconds and all I wanted to do was curse God and die.

I have to watch myself sometimes because I feel the pull to question God and ask him what in the world is going on? It’s like my whole life I was taught that if you ask God for something, “He will give you the desires of your heart.”  I’ve heard that sometimes his best answser is “no”, but I don’t feel that I am asking him for anything, I just need to stay healthy so I can accomplish some goals that are both physical and spiritual in nature.

I don’t think of myself as a whiny baby or someone that feels sorry for himself, but the number of times that I have been injured in the middle of trying to better myself is astounding. A broken foot 2 years ago, before that it was a couple of twisted ankles and then last year I hurt my back on a couple of occasions. During racquetball one day I hurt my wrist so bad I couldn’t turn the key in the ignition to start my car.

Last week I wasn’t feeling very good and so I laid down and woke up with a headache that had to be borderline migraine. I bought some medicine and it started to feel better and I couldn’t help but ask myself the question, “Why is this happening to me?”

I guess I wouldn’t mind these constant setbacks if there seemed to be a purpose. Do I need to be further broken? Humbled? Am i being taught some lesson?

The problem with my life is that everythin, obviously, is interlinked and connected. Things that cause me stress put a small chink in my armor – an armor that I have built up against the threat of myself. Perhaps its not gettng paid by a couple of clients that puts me in a financial bind or an injury, or something work related that I can’t seem to solve. Chink. Chink. Chink. And the walls come crumbling down. I’m defeated and deflated. I can’t cope and so I run to food and spending money to escape from the reality of life and the failures that seem to crush me like a flood.

I’m glad I finally have a name to go with my problem and perhaps now I can find healthy ways to deal with stress when things come into my life that cripple me and threaten to sweep me away on a tide of self-destrutction. But it’s a battle that I have been fighiting literally all my life and I’m tired, so tired of fighting the battle alone.