On the road again...

I have to get some things in order such as mail off my last ebay shipments for the things I posted last week, clean the house and pack things for the week I will be away.

It is time again, folks, for my one week mental health vacation trip. This year I will be staying with my friend Mich and her husband Andrzej in Coventry, CT.

I am really looking forward to it.

It will be a change of scenery, someone else's four walls. And I hope to get to work on some of the things I haven't been able to focus on such as a more focused search for jobs, grants and apartments. I'd like to sketch too because my artwork has really fallen by the wayside over the past few years because I had to focus on other things. And it wasn't that the things I focused on were fun, in fact they were the exact opposite of fun. But I am hoping that in another environment I might get some good sketches done for future paintings.

And maybe some writing, but that seems hazy because I need a lot of reference materials for that and I don't know how much I will be packing.

Which gets me back to the List part of our show. I currently have a list of 25 things I need to do. I also have a rough list of the vague things I need to pack and I have an even vaguer list of the food items I should bring so I am contributing to the household I will be spending my week with. And I know I will forget things, or bring things I don't need, or will not get around to using, but I will write the lists anyways.

I guess the reason women write lists(because most of my friends who suggest lists are 98% of the time women) is so that they feel like they have some control over their lives. That and to get the whirlwind of thoughts of the things that they need to do out of their heads and not have AS MUCH chaos in there. Women's' heads are chaotic enough without all that extra clutter.

So as writing this blog about going away is number 22 on my list(hey, I am not going in order, no one said you had to go in order), I get to cross another thing off that list and end this entry.

I have a lot to do and it seems that I don't have enough time to do all the things that need to get done. Isn't that always the way?

A Morning Spent...

It was a morning spent looking online at Apartments I can't afford, at jobs that either I don't qualify for or that hold not interest for me, at grants pages(I still haven't figured out how to get those to work for me), at Fellowship pages for NY artists, at emails full of spam and trying to find pages of my artist friends...but being unable to open them.

Quite productive, eh?

It has been like this in my life since Tuesday.

The problems began over the fact that when applying for my passport, the government decided that my birth certificate was amended and demand that I provide documentation to verify the amendment. Well, that is sort of hard to provide when your birth certificate WAS NEVER AMENDED.

First phone call was to my mother to find out if she did indeed have my birth certificate amended. Which, after speaking to her, did not amend my birth certificate.

The the next 3 hours was spent on the phone with various branches and departments of vital records, town clerks and NPIC. Nothing was really fixed and all I learned was that I had to write the office that sent me the letter stating my passport couldn't be processed because of the birth certificate amendment. What this is going to accomplish is beyond me but I wrote the letter informing them of the conversations and steps that I did to try and fix a problem that really doesn't exist.

Good to know that our tax dollars are being well spent...searching for documents that aren't needed on documents that were never changed.

So God(pick one of your choice) only knows if I will ever get my passport, since this is the only certificate of birth that I have and that is on record in 2 different cities in the state of my birth.

Maybe they just want to keep my fee...

So a morning spent trying to fix a life full of misunderstandings, lost documents, spam and unanswered emails may be...I don't know what....you fill in the philosophical/zenish answer because I can't figure out the great cosmic plan.

But I have a few cool pictures of my friend and her baby(which I tried to post here...but couldn't figure out how)...so maybe that's all that matters.

Rainy days and Headaches

Today is day 3 on the headache that won't quit. It may have to do with the nasty weather we are having up here. It snows one day then its 58 degrees the next and rains. Most likely it will freeze all up tonight and the driveway will become a sheer glaze ice shoot.

Nothing much has progressed forward in my moving out/move forward portion of my life, though I keep plugging on anyways. Packing takes up a lot of my time. I really need to get back to some work for the show that my friend will be taking my woodburned boxes to, otherwise I won't have very much to sell and then I will have no one to blame but myself if I don't make any money.

I have noticed a disturbing trend in my life lately, however. People have seemed to have stopped listening to what I say, or I notice that all they seem to talk about is TV. It makes me sad, as I don't spend a lot of time watching TV, so I don't have much to contribute to the conversation. In a time when I need friends the most It makes me sad to see so many of the people that I thought were my friends actually could care less about me...

One of the people I actually have been talking to a lot and I have put her in my "support network" catagory of friends gave me her opinion that she has had that happen to her as well and she considers when people stop listening or caring, maybe you have grown beyond what that friendship has to offer and that friend has become "demoted" to an acquaintence. She didn't actually use the word demoted...that's a me-ism, but that was the jist.

I wonder if I am shedding friends like a snake sheds its skin, or if this is the crunch time they talk about when you find out who are your real friends and who are just fair-weather friends.

But I am a firm believer of quality over quanity...so If I have a few good friends over a vast multitude who are there for show, I'll count myself lucky.

It doesn't hurt any less though when you are talking to someone and their expression changes to a "nobody home" look.

I guess I'll have to wait and see who is left standing beside me when the dust settles.