Stressful Blessings

After I published my last post and then went to the blog to view it as any readers would, I realized that my last three posts have started in roughly the same way. It’s always some variation of, “it’s been so long since I’ve posted, I don’t even know where to start.”

This time, at least, I can say that it hasn’t been so long. I suppose I DO know where to start, though only in comparison to the last few posts. Finding a good starting point is never easy. To paraphrase the Princess Bride, anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Sean and I are sitting in the same coffee shop as the last post, across from Willie Nelson’s statue at the Austin City Limits theater. We got 20 percent off our food because Sean has a student ID for grad school which is good for ten percent, and we both knew the trivia answer to the Star Wars question, which gave us another ten percent. Sometimes being nerds pays off.  

There are no lines across the street for any performances today, which kind of surprises me since the major Austin City Limits festival is going on right now. I would have figured they’d be having some live tapings this week. Maybe they will, and I’m just really out of touch. I’m usually out of touch, so I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if that were the case.

Unlike last weekend, we’re sitting inside. We started out on the patio, but the noise and the inquisitive bees and flies drove us inside. Sean was starting to twitch every time a bug landed on him—which, for some strange reason, is way more often than they land on me. He’s just naturally sweeter than me, I guess.

It’s almost a pity we’re indoors now, because it’s a gorgeous day. For the first time in months and months it’s not even in the 90s. It feels almost chilly at 83 degrees.  I guess that’s a sign that I’ve acclimated to the southern heat.

It’s been a hell of a week, my friends. Just one hell of a week. Sean was driving home from the airport late last week, when out of nowhere a high-speed police chase overtook him on the highway. The suspect’s vehicle ran into three or four cars, forcing motorists across multiple lanes of traffic and into medians and shoulders—but luckily no one crossed into opposing traffic. Sean’s car was one of the ones that was hit. No one was hurt, and Sean’s airbags didn’t even go off. I suppose that’s a demonstration that it definitely earned its Consumer Reports rating, which made news the other day for breaking the rating scale. It’s frustrating  because it’s brand new, it’s his dream car, and it’s expensive—but it’s very much a first world problem and we have good insurance. It will take a while to get it into the shop because there’s only one we really feel comfortable taking it to, but it should be done by the end of the month. For now, he’s bopping around town in a rental car.

On top of that there was some serious drama with his work, which I won’t really go into here, but suffice it to say that it made us both sick to our stomachs for a couple days and I was on the verge of tears at any given moment and I think he got even grayer. As a result of what we THOUGHT was going to happen but didn’t end up happening, we broke our lease at the apartment and found somewhere new to live… and we’ve made the decision to go ahead and move anyway, which is never fun but is probably a good idea in this case. It’s funny, because just a month ago I was mopping the floors and chuckling a little to myself as I thought (facetiously) that it might be time to look for a new place because we’ve been in this apartment for nearly a year. I should have knocked on wood.

This means, among other things, that our Christmas letter (assuming I write one) will once again be sent from a new address.

Aside from the stress of moving, I’m excited to get into the new space. I think it suits us better. And it’s about 50 yards away from a nice open dog park, which is a major selling point for us.

Sean and I went to a fundraising dinner for the American Heart Association last night. One of his classmates was instrumental in putting it on, and she invited some of her fellow grad students. It was neat for me to go and meet some of the people that are becoming his friends. It also made me a little smug with pride to hear how much they respect and look up to him. Two of them used to be on his team in class, but they just ended one course and started another and are not on the same team anymore. Both of them lamented the fact that he wasn’t there to be team leader. Sean fell into the leadership role because he just has too much $#@& to do, and doesn’t want to waste time with lollygagging on assignments. Apparently lots of other people feel the same way.

The dress code for the soiree was “Texas Tuxedo.” I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but since I don’t have cowboy boots I settled on a teal skirt, flats, and a gauzy black top with diamonds studded into it that my mom convinced me to buy from Nordstrom Rack before we moved to Texas in case we ever attended fancy work dinners or something. It was the first time I’d worn it here, and it seemed to be exactly the right choice to fit in with the jeans and boots and cowboy hats and cocktail dresses.

They had a live band which was too loud for the space, but they played some good music. Sean and I both have a history of enjoying dancing, and we both are ok at simple West Coast or Country Swing. We know a few simple moves, but when you string them together they look pretty good. They played Boot Scootin’ Boogie, and we paused our conversation at the table and went up to dance. We assumed that other couples would join us as we began the dance, but we went the whole song without anyone else coming up; everyone just watched us from their seats. It began to feel a whole lot like a performance and not as much cutting a rug for the heck of it. I guess the bonus is that we got applause when we were done. The ironic thing is that the floor was full of two-steppers during some of the slower songs, but as simple as it is Sean and I don’t really know how to do the two-step—Texas-style or otherwise. It’s simple enough, though, and I’m sure we could have fit in had we wanted. We were pretty engrossed in conversation with new friends, though, so now I have visions of a cocktail-based housewarming party in November or December. I’m kind of looking forward to it! It’s been a while since we’ve had a lot of friends/companions to choose from. Jobs and school are good places for meeting people.

I just finished week three on the new job. It’s going pretty well… so well, in fact, that I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. The recruiting process for jobs there is pretty intense, regardless of position. They require a CCAT test, which is sort of like an IQ/behavioral test that measures your strengths and traits like competitiveness, attention to deal, ability to think creatively, etc. On top of that, they have a personality questionnaire that also compiles your responses against the CCAT. Apparently less than 20 percent of applicants pass the test. This is actually the second time I’ve had to go through this process and I passed both times. It never occurred to me that it was so difficult for people.  That sounds REALLY arrogant, but I don’t mean it that way. I just took it as a matter of course that nearly everyone passed and they just used the cross-section of results to shepherd people towards applicable open positions based on their scores. It’s probably good I didn’t know it was a pass/fail thing or test anxiety might have tanked me.

But one of the things at work that feels almost a little Stepford-ish is that people really seem to get along. And the company really seems to live up to its self-proclaimed values of Transparency, Ownership, and Continuous Improvement. I’m used to core values like that being buzzwords and nothing more. And I’m also perfectly confident of my ability to do this job, which tends to make me comfortable from the get-go. And my whole team seems utterly confident in my ability to do my job, which is a HUGE change from the last place I was at. I’m hoping the honeymoon doesn’t fade too painfully.

Right now I’m just in a whole lot of training. It’s simultaneously engaging and mind-numbing. There’s a lot to learn, but I think I’m absorbing it quickly.

Because I’m having to do a whole lot of driving now where I basically had none to do before, I started thinking that I might need to change my V6 in for something a little more gas-friendly. I went to a dealership to test drive a used Ford Fusion hybrid, and I hated it. I’m a little bit of a gearhead, and there was just too much compromise involved with the hybrid. It handled well and had enough power, but it wasn’t fun, and the colors and interior options were best suited to someone much older than I feel.  But as we were walking back into the dealership after the test-drive, I saw a little blue Mini Cooper with Union Jacks on the mirrors that happened to be on Labor Day special within my price point… and before I knew it we were buzzing away in the little sub-compact. Sometimes I still miss the power and luxury of my Maxima, but the Mini is lots of fun.

There’s some other stuff going on in our lives that isn’t so much fun. Someone asked me the other day how we were handling it, and I just had to shrug my shoulders. When stuff like this keeps happening—and we’re no strangers to stress—at some point you just have to get your emotions out, let yourself be sick to your stomach for a while, and then you dry your eyes and shrug your shoulders and compartmentalize the best you can while you just look for the next best logical step forward… and you hope that by the time you get five steps down the road you don’t have to compartmentalize anymore, and the stress and pain of whatever you had locked away will fade. The world keeps turning, and if there’s anything the news coverage of those poor refugees half a world away demonstrates, we are incredibly, amazingly, astonishingly blessed.