Happiness….

Work has been positively insane this last week. The weekend we all dread for months finally arrived and is on it’s way out without MUCH of an uproar. Don’t get me wrong, we ALL had overtime, NO ONE took a break, all of us were firing on all cylinders non-stop. I am so sick of the color blue. The word Congratulations is very long and intimidating to write on a cake in one single motion. Whatever. Between friday, saturday, and sunday, we had over 200 cake orders. Yes sirree! This doesn’t include all the cakes we had to make to keep our cases full in addition to all the orders. My hands hurt. You probably don’t want to hear about cakes anymore. I have a point.

I got called in to work early this morning because the head cake decorator had called in sick. GREAT. So the rest of us get to work early and we are trying to get our ducks in a row and figure out who is going to do what when the lead shows up anyway. She looks awful. Just AWFUL. But she felt like she couldn’t leave us stranded so she would just do what she can to help. Thank God! I’m honestly not sure how we would have fared without her. And I realized that I’m going to miss her a lot come september when she retires. I’m not just going to miss her as a colleague, but also as a friend. She’s 66 years old, healthy as an ox (except when she eats bad potato salad) and very wise. She is leaving town. Moving closer to her mother. Her mother is a great great grandmother. That’s amazing. But I am going to miss her. I don’t know if the sentiment is mutual but I’m quite fond of her. Sometimes I kind of want to call her gran. My grandmother was a tremendous lady. She was wise and brilliant and hysterical. She was soft spoken, fiercely loyal and she would do anything for her family. I aspire to be like her. It was today I realized just how attached I am to Marion. Instead of going to work this morning, I wanted to drive over to her house and make sure she was going to be okay. I think I need to start preparing myself for when she leaves. I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to take it. I don’t want her job at all, for the record. I’m too sensitive. If a customer gets remotely upset, my knees start to wobble. I confide in her, I treat her exactly like she actually were my grandmother.

I’ve done a lot of complaining about how I don’t connect with people outside of work, and how I don’t feel like I should connect with my coworkers the way I would with people in the world at large I would consider friends. I came home to a sleeping toddler and a husband who was not home (my mother in law was babysitting) and James stayed asleep for hours. Rob was gone for hours. I sat in the house by myself and since nobody was tweeting or lurking facebook, I had nobody to talk to. The Mommy Tsunami made a blog post that perfectly summed up the jumble of thoughts in my head. It was like reading a more eloquent and thought out version of what I’ve been trying to say for months. It both relieved me to know that I’m not the only one that feels this way, and filled me with a sense of dread..what if the situation doesn’t get any better?

I owe a lot to the internet. Without the internet I would never have started a LiveJournal account more than 8 years ago. I never would have met those wonderful people with whom I’ve forged long lasting and meaningful friendships with. In three weeks, I am to be the Maid of Honor in the wedding of a girl I met on LiveJournal. Too bad she lives 2000 miles away. The LJ friends became facebook friends, and the facebook friends became twitter followers. In April, a friend from all three websites tweeted a link to Matt and Maddy’s blog. I read the story and was an inconsolable wreck all afternoon. I couldn’t wrap my head around that kind of circumstance. It seemed so unfair. It seemed like the kind of thing that would shake a person’s faith to the core. That was April 6th. The next day I would learn of another event that would shake and shatter me all over again. The internet has changed my life forever. I met Rob on the internet. I met Caitlin on the internet. Chances are, I met YOU on the internet. I can’t look at anything purple without thinking of Maddie. I am eternally grateful for all of you. Don’t ever forget it.