The week after my wretched night was my "long week". This is the one week a month that I have to work 4 night shifts instead of three (or 56 hours instead of 42). In a word, it bites. Well, this is also the week where Tropical Storm Fay decided to stall out over Melbourne, the city I work in. Since my commute is 125 miles round-trip and all the roads were flooded, windy and dangerous, I was pretty nervous about the drive. At a couple points, I had to pull over and wait it out because the driving conditions were just that bad. I even had to rearrange a couple of my days around so that I wouldn't be driving to my shifts during the worst of it. Could I call out of work, or get someone else to cover me? Not a chance. No way. Does it matter that I live an hour away? Or that the other two people who work there live within 10-15 minutes of the place? Or that they are men with family nearby if anything happened and I'm a woman whose husband would be 60 miles away? Apparently not, because nobody offers to help me out and when I suggest it, I'm basically told that I'll be expected to make it up at a later date. The moral of the story here, folks, is that the people who work there are simply not interested in coming into work for a millisecond more than absolutely necessary and will do whatever it takes to avoid it at all costs. Gotta love it. It left me wondering what I will do when I'm sick and need to call out or, God forbid, want to take a vacation. But one problem at a time. So that week I endured 56 hours of work, 8 hours of commute, 500 miles of scary driving to and from work, through terrible flooding and tropical storm force winds. To be perfectly blunt, by the end of the week, I was pissed. . . . and wet.
That horrible week culminated on Friday when, in between shifts, I decided I missed my husband and decided to meet him for lunch. That night was the last shift I had left to work that week and I felt energized by the near-freedom and felt like getting out of the house. As I'm sitting at a stoplight, the driver behind me slammed into me. I was spun around (yep, again) and sent into the median. After hitting me, the other driver still had enough momentum to keep going, ramp herself into the median, mow down a palm tree and finally come to a stop in some bushes. I think it's a safe bet to safe she never bothered to brake.
Luckily neither of us were flung past the median into oncoming traffic. Between the hurricane and my long week, my nerves were pretty raw and I didn't handle this so well. I was pretty shaken. I will say I feel terribly lucky to not have been hurt. But I had only had my car for 4 months and I got it about a month after being in another bad accident in March which was a terrible ordeal. Wanna know the best part, though? When I called the boss to tell him about the accident and that I didn't have a car, he ended the conversation with, "Alright, just let me know what you are going to do about tonight!" That's right, folks. He totally expected me to leave for work 3 hours after I was in a car accident which totalled my car. Awesome. I truly felt like I was being shat on by the universe. In the end, though, it wasn't as bad as the first accident. It took several phone calls on my part but in about a week the lady was determined at fault for the accident and my car was deemed officially totaled. I got the money for the car and my previous loan paid off and ended up getting a brand new version of my old car. Not fun, but again, it all worked out in the end.So, yeah, August wasn't a great month for me. But it ended on a decent note, since Aug 30th was the day I got my new car, which was fun. September has been significantly better. Since then I've had 4 weeks of working my normal 3-shift schedule, which has been nice. And while there have been a few annoyances at work, it hasn't been anything awful. Also, for whatever reason, we got the house bug about a week into September and decided to drive around and scout the area of town we were interested in living in to see which neighborhoods we liked. We had fun and even went into a few open houses. We met Meg, our realtor, at one of them. She was very sweet and open. And she offered to dive right into a search for us if we would tell us what we were looking for in a house.
Brad and I were trying not to take it too seriously considering we were in our apartment lease until February 21st and had no interest in paying double rent. But despite our best efforts we (read: me) got excited and dove into house hunting. Over the next 3 weeks we compiled a few lists of houses and looked at about 20 houses in total. We liked a few but there was one that we were interested in from the start and no matter what our mood, never got cut from "the list." We decided to make an offer on it last weekend with the provision that we get a long closing, so as not to pay double rent for more than a couple months. The owners countered and it turns out they want a couple months to stay in the house so they can work on finding their next house in Tampa. We will close November 3rd and they will lease the house back to us until December 31st. We will move in sometime mid-late January (after we make a few improvements) and we'll only pay one month of double rent! How perfect. In short, we got our first house!! YIPPEE!!!
For those interested, here's a link to pictures of our new house!
Talk about semi-charmed life,
~Layne :-D
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