And It’s November

It’s November, y’all! Y’ALL! I cannot believe I just typed that. It’s November 2011 and that means there’s less than three weeks until Thanksgiving and something like seven weeks until Christmas and then it will be 2012 and WHAT THE HELL WHY IS TIME GOING SO FAST?!

October did blow by pretty quickly in this house, more than usual. Seriously, ever since we turned thirty, both Steve and I constantly remark how fast the days, months, and years go by – it’s like the weight of time is bearing down upon us and before we know it we’re OLD.

But October was a crazy month here – I was sick for a week, then spent the next week doing all the prep for vacation that I should have been doing when I was sick, then vacation, then Steve was sick for a week and my dad has been having some heart issues which we still don’t know how they’re going to resolve. Then Halloween, of which we had a party to prepare for and also went over to my parents on Halloween-proper to help with their haunted house.

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Vroom!

Eighteen. That’s how old I was when I got my license. Unlike most kids my age, learning to drive just wasn’t up there on my priority list, which is amazing to me now because I LOVE to drive, for the most part.  (When we exclude eleven hour car trips and daily commutes, and even the commutes weren’t so bad.) It was also amazing because I worked in high school.  I got my first job as a sophomore, when I was maybe fifteen.  I worked in the Men’s Department at Sears and thought I was the shit because I had to dress up and at that age, I hadn’t yet learned that wearing heels was not a good idea for a job you had to stand on your feet for hours on end.

But I worked in the mall from fifteen up until long after I got a license and a car.  And you’d think being forced to take the bus would spur my interests in obtaining my license and essentially, my freedom.  I can’t tell you why except it just was something that never felt like it needed to be a top priority.  Between a very busy and heavy AP/Honors workload at school and my job, I didn’t feel like making time, maybe.  My parents had also explained that I would need to pay my own way and get my own car as well as have limited access to their vehicles and since I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do either on my paltry part-time retail wages, I just didn’t even bother.

The first time I drove by myself was to my high school graduation, in my parents red Grand Prix.

A week after I started driving, I got my first ticket: for turning left on a red light.  Because I wasn’t paying attention or some synapses weren’t firing correctly in my brain.  I thought it was a stop sign so I treated it like on.  Stopped, look both ways and went.  With a cop RIGHT BEHIND ME!

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Finding the Joy

Remember how in my last entry I mentioned that I needed a good rainy day or weekend to sort of justify my grouchiness and grumpiness?  Then I hit publish thinking that wasn’t going to happen because you don’t get multiple rainy days here in Charleston – you get oppressively hot and bright days where the sun beats down on you and the humidity smothers your entire being then in the evening, you might get a really really good thunderstorm as the weather breaks but it’s always back to the same thing the next morning.

Except that following morning, I was startled awake by the sound of Baxter freaking out and of course, being the mama bear I am when it comes to the fur babies, I shot out of bed and ran through the house looking for him only to find him having a literal shit fit at the patio door because he had been caught in a torrential downpour.  This is all fairly uncommon for him as not only has he NOT figured out to bark at the door when he’s ready to come in but he also seemed no where near as affected by thunderstorms and rain as Sammy, who cowers in fear if he hears a storm on TV.

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