Oh My, How Time Flies

Holy crap, it's September! It seems like such a short time ago that I was digging my car out from a blizzard. I can't believe how fast this year is going.

More of the same here in Unemployment Ville. It's been really hard lately to stay positive, and not get down on myself. I've found that I'm so insanely bored during the day. Sure, I'm taking Ozzie out every hour and trying to work on his crate and obedience training, but even at maximum output that still leaves me with a few hours of nothing.

Yesterday Angela was nice enough to get me out of the house for a bit, even if it was just running a few errands. We went by the Humane Society in Littleton so I could drop off their application, then went over to Panera Bread for dinner. Next was a quick trip to Target, then an hour and a half long trip to southern Aurora in rush hour traffic! The hope was to get mani-pedis, but we got there a half hour before they were going to close, and they were pretty packed, so we made appointments for tomorrow afternoon.

I finally got some information back from UC Denver about their Masters of Public Affairs program, and as part of their information they sent a "survey" of recent graduates, and I have to say I'm pretty damn impressed. 80% of grads were employed full-time, and about 70% were employed within 6 months of graduation. Three quarters of grads had a starting salary between $35K and $100K!! That's crazy to me... I guess I'm still in the mentality that $30K is a lot of money (unfortunately, it is NOT in Denver). I am going to UC Denver tomorrow morning to talk to someone a bit about what I'm thinking for my future... we'll see. I'm still not quite sure about it all, but if I am eligible for Pell Grants due to my unemployment and am not having any luck finding another job... I feel like I might as well try to re-establish myself in a professional field.

I know that "medical" is the way to go right now... a girlfriend of mine who was laid off a few years ago got her medical assistant's degree and she's doing great. I guess it's just not for me. Yeah, I could struggle through the classes and get a good, reliable, fairly high-paying job, but I'd be pretty freaking miserable. I'm not the type of person who can go to a job 40 hours a week and hate it... I can't look at it as a job that I just do for money and my life only exists in that non-work time. I tried that once and it led me to heavy drinking!! I just need to figure out what would make me happy... that's been the impossible thing. I keep thinking of these careers I could do, looking at the job postings online, and when I think "Can I do that?" it's usually the same answer: "I don't know." I just don't know what would really make me feel whole.

I'm really envious of people who know from childhood what they want to be. I don't feel like I've ever had that. I just can't pinpoint a single idea, and it's killing me right now. I'm such a control freak, I want to have everything tied up in a neat little package, and everything is unraveling without a way to fix it. I'm grasping at nothing, and I don't know what I'm looking for. It'd be so much easier if I could make that distinction of work versus life, if I could get into a career for the money and dissociate between that and my personal life... I just can't bring myself to do it.

I feel like I'm losing my shimmer, as ridiculous as that sounds. It's just an emptiness that I haven't felt in a long time. I mean, I'm not depressed or alcoholic (I worked too hard to lose 10 lbs, I'm not going to ruin it with booze, at least not till my parents come visit!) but I'm just feeling boring. Simple questions like "How are you?" are hard to answer, because I'm not doing anything and nothing has changed. Yeah, I know, it's only been two weeks, but it's hit me pretty hard.

In other news, Ozzie has been a little shit today. He's had numerous accidents, and I don't know if it is because Matt and I were both home or if it is just puppy tendencies. He was doing so well yesterday! We have had a lot of fun though; he LOVES to lick and nibble on ears! Mirabelle is still doing okay. They run and chase each other, which starts to sounds pretty ridiculous, because Mirabelle is SO vocal that it sounds like she's terrorizing him! They get really worn out and tired from all the running and playing, which is really nice. He's still having pretty bad reactions when he's left alone, mainly because he hasn't been crate trained properly (it's just such a long process, and we don't have the money for a puppy play pen like is recommended), so I'm hoping once he becomes more comfortable with his crate he'll chill a bit. I have a feeling he'll be a very good home-alone dog someday, once he is out of his chewing phase, but I don't want to run that risk right now. I certainly can't wait for his neuter surgery so he will (hopefully) stop marking on the carpet!

(But who could be mad at that face?!)

When I lost my job two weeks ago Matt pulled out of his stock program at work, so his paycheck includes the nearly $300 extra he'd had allocated to the stocks. It was perfect timing; we went to the grocery store today and stocked up on meat (nearly 8 pounds of ground beef for about $15, 3 pounds of chicken breasts for about $6) and got some staples to get us through for awhile. I got a lot of produce to make a soup to eat for lunches (81 calories per serving!) and ingredients for a bunch of casseroles and larger portion dinners. I'm hoping to have lots of leftovers for the next couple weeks.

Great, now our downstairs neighbor has started her evening ritual of smoking pot and burning incense... it just wafts upward through our patio's screen door and stinks up our apartment. God, I can't wait to get our own place, or at least a townhouse or something... I am so sick of shitty and inconsiderate neighbors. On our floor alone we have:

1. Dramatic young-adult neighbors who constantly fight and make up, have friends over at all hours of the day and night, and break the security door so they don't have to constantly let their friends into the building.
2. Older crabby and overly entitled couple with aggressive yorkie-mix Harley, who has on MANY occasions been off-leash (which is illegal in Denver) and attacked Mirabelle.
3. Trashy and rude family that plays their music loud enough to be heard at our apartment, nearly 25 feet away, on the weekends.

This is in addition to the first floor snob with the purebred yorkie that barks at EVERYTHING, the "ethnic" family assigned the parking spot next to us and they can't park worth a damn, creepy pedophile guy, and just about every other dog owner living here, because none of them can seem to pick up after their pets. At least we don't have roaches or other pests, and for the most part our complex is clean, but it'd be so nice to have a place of our own, where we don't have to worry about neighbors sharing walls, floors, or ceilings with us.

And on that rant I suppose I should get to bed. Ozzie's made a pretty solid schedule of waking up around 6:30, so I've been trying to compensate by going to bed a bit earlier. I'm the kind of gal that, once I'm awake, I'm up and I really can't fall back asleep... which has been loads of fun, let me tell you...