Warped Gratitude Blog

Today I am thankful for comforting sleep and sweet dreams. For the first time in years, I slept eight hours.  The essiac tea makes me tired.  I get feverish.  My stomach hurts and I fall asleep.  I have the sweetest dreams.   In my dream, I was at my office.  I had finished up from a day seeing clients needing to grow their confidence and ran across the street to a post office within a gift shop.....it is much like the old shop in the town where I grow up.  The gift shop where I grew up became my first office.   Sigh....  The revealing thing about this is that my favorite clients are artists and musicians needing help growing their confidence or overcoming performance anxiety.  Perhaps....when I'm well....I should advertise solely to people needing this help.   My friend was there.  This was my closest friend in high school.  The guy that looked like my dad and was so hard to kiss....

I am thankful for the feeling of dreams, even if I barely remember the dreams themselves. Last night, I binge watched Battlestar Galactica. I have no clue why I'd do that. It was a corny television show that fills me with memories of hanging out with my grandparents. My grandmother would watch it with me and we'd talk about the Cowboy movies Lorne Greene stared in during her youth. Maybe I watched it because of Dirk Benedict. I was in the same room with him when I was ten years old.  My family and I were at an amusement park in Denver.  He starred in a play. That day, someone pointed him out and mentioned to me that he did a great job despite having cancer. Maybe that's why I felt compelled to watch.... I needed to be reminded that a cancer diagnosis didn't mean death.  Even after a diagnosis, you're still alive. We may as well live to the best of our ability during the time we have. Or maybe - I just wanted to remember Grandma. Or to...

Today I am still thankful that marijuana is legal in Colorado despite the challenges it poses. The only reason I fought for legal weed was my irritation with civil forfeiture laws. I was disgusted when I heard of a little old lady losing her home because her grandson was found with a doobie. I don't smoke. I never have. It's a good thing, too. I'm highly allergic to hemp and cannabis. I thought hemp was like wool - itchy! Well....it turns out I'm allergic to wool, too. ***** I decided that I wanted fresher herbs for my tea. I want fresh organic mistletoe leaves. I'd like fresher slippery elm bark and sheep sorrel too. I think I bought the ingredients when a friend of mine came down with cancer in 2004. He died within days. I am having a hard time finding the ingredients locally, so I decided to conduct a Google search. All I can find are recreational pot stores in my area! Oh my goodness - there is more than one medicinal herb i...

Today I am thankful for blood tests and nurses.  Well.... I've been having a lot of pain in a certain area of my body. It's acting up. It's become worse over the past three years. I thought it was hormones -but- the nurse thinks that it could be an aggressive form of breast cancer. I'm supposed to go to an Urgent Care center tomorrow.  The nurse doesn't think it can wait until next week. If I miss work during the week, I will lose my job.  Since I'm the only one supporting the kids, I can't miss work at all (thanks Colorado Parent Employment Project deadbeat daddy government excuse makers). It's probably just hormones. I mean..... I used to eat a heck of a lot of soy. I don't anymore. I'm sure that the lack of soy estrogen is playing havoc with my body. If it's real.... and I don't post very much anymore..... I'm sure you'll know what happened. It's strange.... I never thought my elderly...

Today I am thankful for people I see everyday. In our lives, we have strangers that we see everyday. There are the people who walk their dogs as we leave for work, the little old lady waiting at the bus stop as we pass by, the shoppers at the market every Thursday at 6:00, even the little kids that cross the street like clockwork each afternoon as they leave school. It's shocking to me how much we notice when one of these people are missing. I often find myself praying when the man with the walker isn't in the park at noon. Every day, since 2008, he has walked in the park. He wasn't there today. I wonder if he injured himself? These are the people in the neighborhood. The friends I could have....if we weren't always rushing around and about. I never thought that they ever noticed me. One did. ***** I must be somewhat happy. Life is stabilizing a little bit. I'm finding ways of getting money to pay bills. I'm finding ref...

Today I am thankful for friends in the legal field.   I had a friend ask me about Michael.  She is a paralegal who works for people arrested for driving while impaired. I told her that my ex was allegedly in a 8-27 month in-patient drug and alcohol program which exempted him from paying child support. She asked to see proof. I gave her access to my email account. As she scrolled through the emails, she laughed at my lawyer. She laughed at the paralegal as she read the emails my lawyer's office sent to me. Then she questioned their efficacy. Apparently, my lawyer's paralegal doesn't use capital letters. I never noticed. My friend did. She said that after spending $10,000 with a law firm, the least they could do is capitalize the pronoun I and begin their sentences with a capital letter. She noted that neither my lawyer nor my paralegal ever answered my question of how and when to proceed. She told me to demand a refund. Lawyers tend to bill us...

Today I am thankful that I've decided to love....no matter what. I was wrong. I was wrong when I tried to convince myself to stop loving people from my past. There is nothing wrong with love: the only thing that can be wrong is what behavior we excuse in the name of love. It's okay for me to care about and love people as long as I don't get myself into a situation where I'm helping them ruin their relationships. I've decided stop hiding from people I care about. I came to this decision due to a dream. ***** I find white feathers while walking around.  In the past, when this happened, I'd run into people from my past.... okay it was a certain person. I found a silver key.  The Pagans of old believed that when you found a key and picked it up....all you had to do is call out a name and the person would be yours. I put the key on Aphrodite's altar. I don't know whose name to call out. Perhaps...I could have screamed out "...

Today I am thankful for time. It has been seven years to the day since I lost my favorite office in Arvada. It was in a professional building that was a pharmacy when I was growing up. This is the pharmacy where I bought cards for Tom, my high school sweetheart.  He bought me stuffed animals. There were so many memories in that place. My office was the one that used to be the room where they filled and stored the drugs.  I still had the little sliding window! I loved it. For the three years I was there, it felt like home. It really felt like home. When I locked up in the winter, I looked at the door and remembered Tom and I huddled with our hot cocoa in the doorway on cold winter nights. It always made me smile. The day I lost my office was the day Tom and I met for lunch for the final time.  He had a question for me but every time he asked it, I heard a whistle. I looked to my right and saw two people watching me intently.  They looked ...

Today I am incredibly thankful that I followed the cat while cleaning the kitchen. It appears that our rescue cat has a rattle.  I never really bothered to see what it was she was batting around the kitchen floor. Eventually, she stopped. In the back corner of the kitchen, behind a cabinet, I found a nearly full bottle of Oxycodone/Acetaminophen 10-325 that was prescribed to my ex-husband in 2015. I'm very thankful I found it.  I'm carrying around with me until I can dispose of it. Fortunately, my new employer has a drug collection site. Wow....... I had no idea that he was taking this medication -nor- did I know he left it in the house. I've taken in two teenagers since he left!  One of them has a drug problem. I am very thankful the cat found it first. ***** I lost a 22 year old co-worker last spring due to her taking an Opioid.  She spent the night with a guy she barely knew.  She was housesitting with him and they were both found de...

Today I am thankful the people I meet in Boulder. Boulder is about 30 minutes away from the town where I grew up. I visit a few times a year so I can stock up on Celestial Seasonings tea. I try not to buy many things in Boulder as they have a baggie tax. I hate regressive taxes. I love the students at the University of Colorado. I love how inspired I am to take on weirdos at the Statehouse when I leave that horribly liberal city. But this...... this....... I'd love to be in a band that does this!! Someone invited me to a rock music mantra event. Oh my......I'd love to do this! I could wear my bohemian ritual clothes, spin around with my bass like a whirling Dervish and sing mantras all day! That's my dream job. For the first time in my life, the people in Boulder have inspired me to do a tad more than fight tax hikes and b!tch. I should revel in the moment. Maybe....if I put the right energy into the universe, I'll find myself d...

Today I am thankful for the insight of dreams.  I'll start by sharing the backstory.   I have a zombie love.   It's more than 30 years old.  It should be dead.   In reality, it died in May of 1987.   It came back, over and over through the years..... like the undead.   The heartbreak has been a constant companion throughout my adult life.  It's a part of who I am.   When I see him, which happens from time to time, I feel the same ache.   When people ask about him, which happens more often that I'd like, it brings back the loss.  In fact, once while visiting the city in which we grew up, I had a psychiatrist buddy of mine remark that I have aura of a woman who lost her best friend.  I reek of personal loss.  I have accepted it.   It's part of my story I really wouldn't know what to do if I felt another way. It's a part of me. It has made me t...

Today I am thankful for downloads on the internet. Today I downloaded information about the The National Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED).  It would seem that Arapahoe County is ignoring the rules. I am also thankful that the people funding CO-PEP understood that domestic violence is often a part of family life.  They have accounted for this fact by partnering offices with a domestic violence expert.  My ex should also have a case manager.  Is that person aware of the stalking and nutty messages I receive now? My ex was my stalker.  He claims to be a victim who is homeless and voluntarily in a 27 month rehab program for alcoholics (even though he swears up and down he's not a drinker - I've never seen him drink alcohol either because the doc said it would kill him). CO-PEP is a division of the Child Support Enforcement office.  My ex reached out to them to lower his child support payments. They did.  T...