Glamanate

Today is Friday, May 28th.  I turn 22 today.  Two weeks ago I was in a grease fire accident and ended up at a burn clinic in Milwaukee. Last week Friday I was able to come home from the burn clinic and sleep in my own bed and shower in my own bathroom. Most of the small burns have faded into tiny red marks, my face no longer has scabs, and the burns on my stomach, chest and right shoulder are just now done scabbing. My left arm is doing better, the skin is growing and the third-degree-burns are steps away from healing up like all the others.

Next week Friday I will be at my rehearsal dinner, maybe going down to Villa De Carlos at 10pm to see the comedy show after. Then I’ll go to sleep, wake up, and have to prepare myself for my wedding.

I was planning on a get together tonight for the wedding party and other friends, a nice cook out to celebrate the wedding and our new house, actually make use of our backyard. But now I’m sitting here in bandages,  hardly able to use my arm, and I cannot even sit in the sun for more than a few seconds. It’s odd how a serious injury can affect you more than physically. Because now I want to do is act like a hormonal teenage girl and sit in a corner sulking eating a tub of ice cream because today’s going to suck.

My bachelor party is tomorrow. I just wanted to go through that rite of passage, having a few beers with the guys, the last “hoorah’ as a single man, I don’t know why, it doesn’t matter much. But it just sucks knowing that got taken away. I know I can still have fun, and my friends will still be there, but it still just doesn’t feel the same.

It could be worse, maybe it seems so bad because there has been so much goddamn drama in the past six months between friends and family that this little setback just seems so defeating. Maybe I just needed to bitch about it to a computer screen knowing someone will read it, making me feel less pathetic spewing to a friend in front of me, but at the same time more pathetic because I couldn’t.

Happy birthday, me.

So its now a little over two weeks into 2010; and in months following there is so much wedding planning, house work, and other things coming. It’s weird to think back that it has only been a year since last January. Since then I’ve moved out of my own apartment, then moved into my (then girlfriend) fiancée’s apartment, went back to school, became close to my soon-to-be mother and father in-law, went camping, went to Las Vegas, celebrated my first ever year anniversary, actually spent Valentines day with someone, proposed to have the love of my life marry me, turned twenty-one, spent Christmas day without my parents, with my fiancée’s help bought and moved into a house, moved out of our first place together, and grew so much. Hell, I am pretty sure I spent about two and a half months just on vacation.

2009 started with flying back from California after having the pleasure of meeting Amanda’s mom and her step-dad, Bob. It was also the close to an era of living alone and some ridiculous times in that apartment. It was also the start of a new life with the girl I loved so much. By spring we were back in California again, and soon it was April. I started school because I knew I was going to be with Amanda for a good long while, and I needed to make good of myself. By this time next year I will have my Associates Degree…and hopefully starting my career.

On May 1st I decided I wanted to propose, and my mom gave me her great-grandmothers engagement ring to propose with. On May 5th I proposed, and had one of the happiest days of my life. I also made a pretty big mistake by not calling her own mom. I spent a good two hours of the next day apologizing for not asking for her blessing…and thankfully she has forgiven me.

We spent July 4th in Las Vegas, on a ten-day trip to the West to visit her mom and step-dad. And then on top of that we were off on a camping trip once we got back. It was perhaps the best camping trip out of the three we’ve organized.

The rest of the year was filled with wedding planning and hopes for the future. By middle of October we found a house we wanted, and put in an offer. By the end of October we had officially purchased our first house. In between going to California again for Thanksgiving, continuing wedding plans, we managed to move in our home by mid-December before we left again to go to California for Christmas. It’s weird, too, it was probably the first time I have ever felt home sick. Whether it was because it was my first Christmas without my parents, or perhaps because I was so happy with where my home finally was.

So much has happened, so many things changed. I can only imagine what this new year holds.

Today at work I began to ponder again about the difference in customer relations between food service work and computer support work.  People can be pretty stupid, I can too, we all have our off days. But you would think that when dealing in computer support there would be more frustration. Hell no.

I have come to realize that it is more difficult to help a person face-to-face in making their own food than it is over-the-phone in troubleshooting a computer problem. I am about eight percent sure that I had an easier time at ResNet trying to tell the most computer illiterate person how to access their network settings over the phone. I wish I could tape some conversations at Subway. How hard is it for people to read and use common sense? I understand it can be kind of confusing the first few weeks after Subway no longer has all sandwiches as $5 Footlongs. But hell, there has only been two times Subway did that. Is it that difficult to read and understand what sandwiches are $5 Footlongs?

I have ran into students who plugged a phone cord into their Ethernet port, plugged their Ethernet cord into the phone jack; misread signs about where to plug their Ethernet cord in. I dealt with foreign exchange students who lugged around bulky IBM Thinkpads. Granted, there were a lot of occasions when there were some customer flare ups. But now I am almost certain that I’d gladly replace those interactions with the mind numbing idiocy I ram heads with ever day at Subway.

The Strip was fun on the Fourth. We missed the fireworks – in fact only one place had public ones. So we wandered for four hours. I’ve got all the pictures on my Facebook, Flickr is going to wait until I am home.

We started to leave around 3ish in the afternoon, we made it about thirty miles in two hours. Traffic was horrible and it was hot. Projections were saying about an eighteen hour drive to Orange from Vegas. We bunkered down at a hotel.

The three hotels by us were quickly filled, we got two of the last ones. People were setting camp on the slots and in the lobby; all frantically trying to get a room.

I did however have some of the best damn french onion soup of my life.

Around ten at night we headed to bed to nap. We left twelve hours after we started. We just got back.

Bob’s got to go to San Diego for work again, so Amanda and I will be joining him and her mom. We’re only going for the night, though.

Quite the vacation so far.