The long overdue update

I have been gone from the blogosphere for quite some time now and have a long period of time to cover, so I shall be forced to give a whirlwind version of everything!

Christmas was nice. Yes, it was hard to be away from my family, and that made it just different for me. The way I felt leading up to the day I wouldn't have minded if the holiday never came, but it was definitely more fun than I had anticipated. The family I was with made me feel like one of the family, and I know that their efforts paid off. I am close with them anyway and know that they are probably the only family that could really integrate me that well. I survived my first Christmas away from home. I can do it, but I don't want to be doing it every year! My family did something for me that is great and makes me miss them a lot. They all got together and sang the 12 Days of Christmas, acting out the gifts. It was hilarious. My roommate watched it and said that it made me make more sense. We're all a bit goofy and I think everyone in my family is a bit of a ham. I love my family, but we would probably frighten the faint of heart!

Nicole and I had a small group of friends over on New Year's Eve. We played a game until midnight, watched a movie after that and then the two girls who were still there after the movie stuck around until 3:00 while we together sang karaoke. We didn't have a drop of alcohol among us at the party, but I tell you the four of us probably sounded completely intoxicated to anyone who could hear us, but it was fun! I almost freaked out the next morning because I couldn't find the Rose Parade on TV. New Year's Day isn't New Year's Day without the Rose Parade. It is the ONLY parade I will ever watch, and I watched it much more closely this year than I have in years past. It's a Southern California classic, less than 30 miles from home, and I wanted to savor that taste of California! The problem was that I was up too early and it didn't start for another 45 minutes, so I didn't see it on the guide. Nicole had to tell me where to find the commercial-free broadcast on a cable TV station. Back home it was always broadcast commercial-free on the local network, and I hate the thought of missing something on the parade because the floats are all so cool. When I was in high school I actually went one day to help decorate the floats. My job was to cut dried flowers for other people to apply to the float. It wasn't very glamorous, but it makes me appreciate the parade more. Every square inch of the float must be covered in organic material, and those floats are big, so I know it takes a lot of people cutting up flowers for hours to make those things as beautiful as they are!

Work is going well lately. There's nothing huge to report there, but I am starting to feel comfortable with my job and find that people ask me questions! We've got a new group of people starting soon, so I am sure that I will have more opportunity to help out than ever before, and that feels nice. I stopped by last night to take some cookies to some of my friends and some tea for a friend who is sick and while I was there my supervisor told me to clock in so we could do my "coaching session" for the week that we missed on Thursday. I got an extra hour of overtime out of it, so I won't complain! We listen to calls during the coaching sessions and get scored on whether or not we do all of the things we are supposed to do - it's a quality control thing and a lot of the points are stuff like saying please and thank you and using the customer's last name. 20% of the score is for selling to the customer, and until yesterday I had never gotten those points. I got 100% on both calls we listened to. I admit that it is because I had written down the calls that I had attempted to sell on, but it's something my supervisor tells us we can do because she wants to encourage sales and high scores because it gets us motivated to continue attempting to sell. It may sound silly, but when you have been there for less than four months and can get full points on your calls, that's a big deal. My supervisor is really good at getting us excited about improving our overall quality in a positive way, and she will tell us what we should work on, too, so it really helps us to grow. I am also pleased because I got two raises recently, one that we knew we would get after our first 90 days and a second that is part of the changes they are making since merging with another division, and am now making 66 cents per hour more than I was before Christmas. That's always nice!

For the past three weeks I have been struggling with a friendship that looks like it may be over, and that the rift is caused by something that I did. What I did seemed like a stupid, simple thing to me but I think really hurt the other person and really hindered their ability to trust me. It has been a long three weeks, but yesterday I finally realized that I was being really unfair to the other party involved. I tried to make myself out to be the victim and the other out to be a villain when in reality we are both at fault and have both hurt each other. I know at least for me the hurt was deep. It started out as sadness and remorse mingled with the feeling of rejection and then started to turn a little bit more defensive and bitter until yesterday when the remorse started to replace the bitterness again. I have not really spoken to the other person involved since this started, which is their choice and not mine, but I think I wasn't ready until yesterday and now I am ready to forgive and give them a second chance if they are willing to give me one, but I am also more ready to realize that my actions, as innocent as they seemed to me at the time, do have consequences and that the price for this one may be quite dear. I have learned a lesson from this situation, and I am glad I started to see how I need to change and respond to this instead of dwelling on what the other person should do. I just hate the fact that it took me three weeks to realize that. This painful situation is, admittedly, probably the biggest reason I haven't been blogging much. I didn't even talk to my parents for a week after it happened, which for me is almost an eternity!

I am wearing glasses right now. This is newsworthy to me! I picked them up yesterday along with a year's supply of contact lenses. I think it's the first pair of glasses I've gotten since early college, so it's kind of nice to have a pair with the right prescription. I actually wore them for a long time yesterday, and, after an initial spell of what felt like motion sickness from the very real difference between how you see with glasses and contacts, I managed to wear them without getting a bad headache like glasses always gave me in the past. I am sure the contacts will be back in within a few hours, but for now I'm giving the glasses a chance.

I think that is my recent life in a nutshell. It has its ups and downs, for sure, but I can see the hand of God throughout!