I'm sort of pathetic.

See, Mark's only been at his parents' house for, what now, not even 12 hours. He's been gone for like 14, maybe. And I'm already dying without him.

I always appreciate my husband. I love the way he loves me and makes me laugh and cares for me. But I forget how much I love his company until he's gone. The thing is, I can't remember a time when he left to go somewhere without me. Sure, I've left HIM to go visit friends or family ... but I can't remember the last time I've been by myself at night. It was probably back when he worked night shift. And even then, I knew he was coming home soon.

This time, it's different. It could be because I'm tired, or because I'm cramping like whoa, or because it was a long day. Or because it's 9 PM and  I'm still waiting for my cornbread to cool off (would you hurry UP already??) so I can construct this layered salad thing to take with me tomorrow. Or because I have a hole in my foot that hurts. Or a hole in my mouth where I bit it when I was eating a donut. (Yes, I know they're terrible. Do I care? Um, not tonight.)

But whatever the reason, I'm really missing Mark tonight. I can't wait for Kelly to come. It'll be better when the house doesn't feel quite so empty.

Tired, but good

I'm exhausted tonight.

I miss Elissa ... it's been forever since I saw her.

I'm sad that I couldn't see either my dad OR Mark's dad on Father's Day.

But...

We had bruschetta for dinner. We channeled Julie, from the movie Julie & Julia. You know that scene, where she cooks bruschetta in the beginning of the movie, and her husband is totally stuffing his face? That was us. It was FABULOUS.

On that note ... check out my food blog later! I kind of tweaked the look of it, so it looks a bit better (I think), and I'll have a new (actual) food post up soon. Not bruschetta, but almost as good :)

Hope everybody had a great weekend!

Man, I'm tired...

My body doesn't like evenings or nighttime. Especially after a 12-hour shift. The body shuts down even when the brain is still going...

A conversation between my brain and my body:

BRAIN: "Oh, come on, you can stay up a little while longer. Andy and Suzie will be here soon!"

BODY: "No way. I can't. I'm tired."

BRAIN: "But you haven't seen them in such a long time - don't you want to see them?"

BODY: "Yes. But I can't. And tomorrow's busy. And I want to sleep and rest and be happy."

BRAIN: "Andy and Suzie make you happy."

BODY: "No. Only sleep will make me happy now."

And so it goes. The brain says "Get up!!" and the body says "Not on your life." We'll see what happens when Andy and Suzie actually get here...

Ready to go...

Mark is here with me in Chattanooga. So nice to have him here!

I'm getting so impatient to be back in Birmingham. 5 more days here, total, and it's going to be fun - I'm getting my hair cut tomorrow with Mark, and then Sunday night I think my mom and I are seeing Julie and Julia, and then Monday morning we're having girls' day. And Wednesday will be my last night. I'm so ready.

Feeling better

I'm feeling much better and less discouraged today. I spent the day yesterday with Sarah and Thomas (they were kind enough to let me crash after work, and I stayed really late), and it sort of refreshed me. We spent the day talking, eating tacos/taco salad, and then Sarah and I watched girly movies while Thomas escaped. Too bad Mark couldn't have been there...

Two more nights to go - I can totally handle that. (Right?) Then I'm back to Birmingham on Thursday, staying there a night to recuperate from my week of insanity, then we're headed to my in-laws' house for one or two nights to visit. (We also get to hang out with an old friend of Mark's on Saturday, and I'm exicted about that, too!) Then it's back to Birmingham, to prepare for the arrival of Andy and Suzie! I'm picking them up at the airport on Tuesday evening, so I only get a few days with them before I leave for Chattanooga again (so sad!), but hopefully I can get at least a bit caught up with them. It'll be a busy week, but the good kind of busy :) I'm excited about it!

2 down, 4 to go...

I am getting impatient. I have been in Chattanooga since Wednesday, I've worked two nights, and I have four nights of work to go, and I get to leave on Thursday. I'm getting burned out - not so much from my job, as just the situation that we're in right now. Mark makes EVERYTHING so much easier to deal with - he's like my buffer against the world, he can always make me smile and laugh and I can always count on him if I just need a hug or a cuddle ... and I don't have that, and I don't have it on the weeks that I'm the tiredest. My patience is wearing, my reserves are wearing, I don't feel well a lot of the time, and I'm just ready to move on. Patience, April, patience.

I keep thinking about how WONDERFUL working two days a week in the daytime will be.  And I can't wait for fall. I went shopping with my mom and grandma yesterday, and got a few new sweaters, and it just really put me in the mood for temperate weather and the crisp, cool air and the nostalgic feeling I always get as the leaves are turning. Thinking about fall, and Christmas, and winter in Birmingham again, just makes me so thrilled and excited, and I just really can't wait to see what this new chapter in our lives brings. I feel like I'm on the edge of something just wonderful, and I'm so excited to see what God has in store for us :)

I'm going to make it this week. Two more nights, then I spend Monday with Sarah and Thomas, which will be lots of fun, then two nights after that .. and then, back to Birmingham. (And then to Griffin, to see Mark's family.)

Making it...

Well, I've made it through my first night back in Chattanooga ...

Things are good on the New Job front. Yay! Hopefully things will happen soon...

I've got this week of work (off tonight, then work Fri, Sat, Sun, off Mon, then work Tues, Wed), home to the 'ham for a week, then back for my usual bookend week, and then - no more traveling (hopefully)!! I can't wait. Although I will miss my co-workers, cause they're awesome...

Also - I updated my blog (obviously). LOVE having a pretty blog :)

somedays aren't yours at all... they come and go as if they're someone else's days...

Today has been weird. I feel weird - easily distracted, restless but listless, going from one thing to the next, can't concentrate ... mark's been quiet too. I think it's the rain.

He had his orientation for volunteering at the civil rights museum today - still there, actually. I hope it went/is going well, and that he'll like it.

The one productive thing I have done today is get together all the pictures I haven't scrapbooked (I'm so behind!! Last I scrapbooked was this past FEBRUARY!!), and compile them on a CD. I'm going to run them over to Wal-Mart to be printed (because I can't find a Wolf camera anywhere close - they seem to have all closed! anybody know anything about it?) after Mark gets home. Next week (after I work) I'm going to try and get caught up with all that. It'll give me something to do while Mark is reading like crazy.

I have absolutely nothing insightful or relevant to say today. And no energy to think anything up. Please come back, sun :(

Mark-less and whiny

It's now officially day 6 of my Mark-less stretch ... And I miss him a whole lot. This week is not as bad as the last week that I worked (partly because I am no longer pms-ing, which keeps my emotions in significantly better check...). But it is still no fun. for us, who were ALWAYS together, the every-other-week thing is beginning to get old. (Which is really bad, since it's only been 2 weeks of working so far...) The only times we've really been apart is back in college, when we were on summer break, and since we've been married, just once when I went on vacation with my mom and my sister. I'm used to seeing him every single day, and it's hard when I can't. I'm tired of my ring finger feeling naked for a week at a time (we can't wear rings at work), and I'm tired of having no one to cuddle in bed when I get home from work, and I'm tired of feeling tired and a bit isolated while I'm at my parents' house, and I just miss him an awful lot.

He misses me too. He says that he doesn't sleep well without me - when I'm at home, Mark hibernates like a bear. He sleeps at least 9 hours every night, and more if I don't wake him up. When I'm gone, and not in the bed with him, he's restless and tosses and turns and only sleeps about 5 or 6 hours. (Which subsequently causes him to take lots of naps during the day. This needs to be resolved soon, or he's never going to get any productive studying done...) I'm pretty sure he's lonely a lot of the time, because he's not really a social person, especially by himself, and he's probably just sort of hole-ing up in the townhouse with nowhere to go and no one to talk to. This makes me sad, because I want him to be happy. I think things will be better when Andy and Suzie move back, but hopefully I'll have a job by then and we'll all be together again :)

I hope my new job works out, so that I can be home with Mark. I want a dayshift position so that I can cook for him when he goes to class, and be home when he gets home, and on my off days, be able to take care of the house adequately. Really, I'd just prefer to be a housewife, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. I would like to be able to take care of him, though. I hate it that he has to make grocery lists and go to the store by himself and do the laundry and wash all the dishes, etc. etc. while I'm gone. I used to consider myself such a "feminist" - when I was in high school, I always thought it was so dumb when women bent over backwards to do stuff that a man is perfectly capable of doing as well (ie. cooking, laundry...) It drove me crazy. But I understand now - it's not that they don't know how (I guess some of them don't, though, which still makes me a bit crazy...) - Mark is perfectly capable of doing all of the aforementioned things, but because I love him, I want to do them for him, because that's a great way for me to serve him. Sort of like I'm perfectly capable of carrying my own bags and opening the door and staining our furniture and banging nails into the wall - but Mark does those things, because he likes to take care of me, and that's his way of serving me.

As hard as this whole process has been so far, it's made me stop and think about marriage, and what it means, and what you should never take for granted. It's given me a greater appreciation for the "give" side of give-and-take, because it's becoming something I strive to do more and more. In the two years that we've been married, I think we've both done a lot of giving (and thus, a fair amount of taking), and for a while, I wasn't focused as much as I should have been on the giving aspect. But I'm finding that it feels so much better to give than to take, particularly to someone who you love so, so much, because you want to do it. And because it ends up being better for the both of you, in the long run. It's taken me a long time, but at this point, I'm really sort of looking forward to the unknown (and for those of you who know me well, this is sort of a shocker.) I'm excited about what the future holds, what will happen After Grad School. I don't know where we'll move, and I don' t know what Mark will be doing or what I will be doing, but I'm really peaceful about the whole thing right now, and I know that God will take care of us. I also know that God will take care of us in the next couple weeks, as we find out if I get to make the permanent move to Birmingham. I hope so. I pray that the job will just fall into my lap. But if it doesn't - life will go on, I think.

Home

Yesterday, after working a horrendous 6 days out of 7 total, I was tired. So tired, in fact, that when I woke up at noon-ish (a mere 4.5 hours of sleep, thankyouverymuch), I could not move. So I laid in bed for almost an hour, browsing blogs and facebook, until my limbs worked. I got up, stumbled to the shower, ate lunch, had a chat with my mom and sister, and came home.

The drive seemed longer than normal, probably because I was just. so. exhausted. Not sleepy, but physically TIRED. Finally I got to Birmingham, and promptly PASSED MY EXIT, which caused me to burst into tears and call Mark, crying: "I *gasp* just passed the 31 exit *sob* WHERE DO I GO??? *meltdown*" My poor brain was so overused and worthless at this point that I couldn't figure out the roads that I drove for four years. Mark lovingly talked me through it, even staying calm while I yelled at him, and I did indeed arrive safely.

I have never been this glad to see mark, except for twice before, out of the six years we've known each other: the first was after our summer apart while he was in spain, the second, after he returned from his safari in kenya. There are a lot of things I love about Mark. I've always loved them - but this last week, I MISSED them. We've never been apart for that long before, since being married. The one time we were apart for an extended amount of time was when I went on vacation with my mom and sister, and I was gone five days, and very much wanted to be away (not from mark, but wanted to be IN hilton head), and was NOT working and was NOT tired. And still, I missed him sorely. This time however, I ached for him, especially a couple of days. After I got home yesterday, I was weepy, mostly because I was tired, but partly because I was just so thankful to be with him again. Anytime he did anything nice or typically wonderful of him, I would cry.

Case in point:
Mark was saying that he really hoped I would hear something from my applications soon, so I could make a permanent move to this place we love. I agreed, but admitted that I hadn't called the manager or nurse recruiter or anybody. Mark shrugged, smiled at me, and said "Who cares?"
And I started to cry. Because he understands. Because for days, all I've heard is advice about being a pest until they hire me, about marching in with references and jobs falling in my lap, about calling everybody who works on that unit, about making myself known... Because this wonderful man I married knows how tired I am, knows that there's only so much that I can handle, knows I'm sick of hearing it, and just loves me. Job in Birmingham or not. And that, my friends, is why I love my husband.

I really miss Mark. Really really really you have no idea how bad MISS him. And everything I love about him. (Like the look he often gives me when one of my family members is getting on my nerves. It's this "I know you're upset, but i think this is hilarious" kind of look. It really breaks the tension for me.) It's been hard at the house a bit, sometimes, just transitioning back to living with lots of people who tend to have a bit more drama than I'm used to. I swear, after Mark, I could never live with girls again (excluding Elissa, who is always my exception.) It's hard, because now that I finally feel like a grown-up, I'm forced into a situation where I'm not exactly in the place of one (although my family, for the most part, is doing an excellent job where all that is concerned, and I am so blessed and loved and lucky to have them.) I just want my husband. I don't say publicly enough, or often enough, how much I love him and how just INCREDIBLE he is. And how lucky I am to have him. And how I have no idea how I managed to land him, but now that I've got him, I'm keeipng him forever. Being away from him makes me appreciate all the things I love about him even more, and makes the things that I sometimes don't love (like him always leaving packages of food open on the inside of the box so they get stale - HATE THAT!!omg) not seem so bad after all. (Because I'd rather have Mark and stale cheerios than no mark and crunchy ones...) And it's not that we're particularly co-dependent, because we're both clearly functioning just fine by ourselves - but I just MISS him, and I want to be able to sit down and talk to him face to face, and I want a hug from him and to cuddle and for him to make me laugh ...

I miss him :(

On a more positive note, since that sounded so broody...

-Just two more nights of work after these last 3-ish hours (please please go by quickly, hours!)
-On thursday, after I wake up, I'm headed back to birmingham to see mark :)
-I might (i hope i hope i hope) have somebody to switch with me so I can stay for a week in birmingham this time. :)
-I can sleep all day long today if I want. which I do want. Really badly. (Here's hoping I can just stay asleep today...)

Speaking of sleep ... I love it. I love, love sleep these days... Cheers to sleeping - how I love thee :)

Moved In!

(But not yet unpacked.)

Well, I made it through. Funny how life is like that. You think you're going to just DIE, and then somehow, magically, you don't. You live to tell about it, and you gain funny stories, more experiences, more colors on your paint pants, new pictures for your scrapbooks.

These last few days have been so much easier than I ever imagined, mostly due to my fabulous husband and family and friends. On Tuesday, while I slept off a crazy two previous days, they (our band of 6 dutiful workers) packed up our entire side of the duplex and loaded it onto the truck in 3 hours. They came to eat lunch, and we went back and cleaned. About an hour or so later, we were off. Got to the 'ham around 5-ish, unloaded everything (just me, Mark, Dad, and Thomas) in about another 3 hours. (Dream team, right there.) It was a good day. Long, but good.

Then yesterday, we unloaded the washer and dryer and pushed them up a HUMONGOUS hill (actually, not me. just dad and mark and thomas. i would have died) to our storage room. Took the truck back, organized my kitchen, unpacked a few more things. Dad and Thomas left, and I went to buy paint.

Today, we started painting. Thus far we've primed a wall, a large bathroom, and a small bathroom, and painted on top of the primed wall. Not too shabby, I say. We still have to paint the office (Aloe Vera!), the bathroom (Delicate Mist!), the downstairs bathroom (Luscious Lavendar!), and prime and paint the kitchen (First Light!). So lots to do ... but we're going to try to finish everything but the kitchen tonight. Which means that I should probably get on that.

Pictures will come soon.

Stressed, Tired, and Defeated (almost)

I know a lot of you (friends, family, etc.) are getting tired of hearing about how much my life sucks. So I'm going to write this, and then try very, very hard to focus on the positive, be productive, and stop complaining so much. I work better with lists/categories/etc, so here goes...

Job searching:
No go, once again. I look, and look, and call, and have people send letters of recommendation - and still nothing. I keep wondering if it's me, if I just don't know the right people, or if I'm doing something wrong... But in reality, bottom line ... it just sucks right now. Job searching of any type. Because the economy just sucks right now. To put it in perspective:
I had a conversation with one of my managers the other day during which we talked about jobs and internet listings, etc. And in our hospital here in Chattanooga, there is one job posting for a position in the NICU on night shift. And my manager told me that the last time she checked, there were 180 applicants for that one job. ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY. So. I figure that same issue, plus the HORRIBLE economy in Birmingham right now, plus all the hiring freezes, plus low census in general, compounds the problems I'm having into one big stinky mess.

I have switched my outlook. I am now planning to continue working in Chattanooga indefinitely, until something opens up in Birmigham. Which I guess was the plan all along, but I honestly thought I would have a job there by now. Oh well.

Scheduling issues:
This month is just going to suck, work and moving and scheduling-wise. I have a total of 6 days off until we move. Three of those six, we'll be in Griffin for the 4th of July. (Commence meltdown.) I work Thursday, then next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I have Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to pack nearly everything, then Mark will finish while I'm working Sunday and Monday. Another problem: I work Sunday night, then stay over an extra 4 hours Monday morning for a CPR recert class. I found a wonderful soul who will work my first half of Monday night, and then I'll go in at 1AM-7AM ... and then it's moving day. We move Tuesday and Wednesday, and then run errands Thursday, and on Friday I come back to Chattanooga for the weekend. Sunday I go back to Birmingham when Elissa, who I love and who is the best friend EVER, is coming to help paint and unpack and organize, which needs to be done by Wednesday night, when I have to go BACK to Chattanooga. I guess I'd better get used to it - this is going to be my life, for now.

Money stresses:
Cost of living (at least for us) is higher in Birmingham. I will be making the same, and Mark probably won't be getting paid for anything he'll be doing down there. At work, we're supposed to get a 3% raise in July, but they're also increasing our insurance premiums (and giving us LESS coverage in a move that only Erlanger could pull off...), so I probably won't see any of that raise at all. (This, by the way, is the first raise I'll have gotten in the TWO YEARS that I've been at the hospital. Yeah. Love that.) So our budget is gonna be tight. Add to that Mark's dental work that he just got done, PLUS we found out today that he's going to have to go see an oral surgeon to get his wisdom teeth out (which we weren't counting on), and he has to have a few more things done. All that adds up to $$$$$.

And yet, the silver lining (this is me thinking positively):
Our marriage will be stronger. We can survive most anything if we can get through all this. Which we will. And it will be fine. Just slightly upleasant for a time.
Mark and I are both becoming more sacrificial through this whole process. I've come to see HIM as my family, and want to travel where he wants and needs to go, and do what's best for us, not just what is more comfortable for me.
With me traveling back and forth, and being gone for 7-9 days at a time, Mark will be able to study adequately for his grad school classes and get all his reading done and still have time to volunteer where he needs to. And the time we will have together will be extra good.
I still get to do my dream job, and get paid for it (even if the pay isn't so great).
We're getting to see Jesus through our families and friends, who have been understanding and helpful and gracious and generous through this whole thing. Our families have been more than willing to help us out wherever they can. Several friends have freely offered their homes and apartments for me to stay in while I'm in Chattanooga if the need arises. I had one friend, who helped us move the last two times, actually tell me that he would be slightly offended if we didn't ask him to help us out again. Thank you. So much.
And honestly, these two years, however tough they may be, are a means to an end. A graduate degree (and two years for the economy to pick itself back up, hopefully) means opportunities for a better job for Mark, and better pay, and a better work environment. Which would thus give me the opportunity to have babies and work prn (or not at all, if possible.) Our family will be better because of this. And so even if I have to travel back and forth from Chattanooga to Bham for the entire two years, it will be worth it, because of the opportunities that will come afterward.

This will all work out. I have to believe that it will.