reality hits, softly
Coming home from Disney was pretty astonishing. Mind you understand that while we were gone, we had vacationers in our home that helped fund the trip. So squeezed in between the car seats of the back seat of our station wagon, I rode home to find the power was out. Immediately I assumed I had not paid the bill. I knew we were behind, one thing that happens when you say goodbye to a paycheck is you also give yourself some more time to pay certain bills than you ordinarily would. Just in case. Anyway it appeared that I had messed up, that the deadline had passed, and that the power had been cut off due to nonpayment. I was pretty beside myself. We looked at how clean the house was, the flowers in the vase, and grabbed a box to throw food from the fridge. We were going to Mom and Dad's until I could get the utilities turned back on. Curious that things were still cold in the fridge. But no matter, off we went. Coming home turned out to be not coming home at all. We made do. At least, until I wondered where my computer was.
Around 9pm we had scoured everyplace we had been since leaving the airport and realized the bag with all the electronics (which was my dh's carry-on) did not make it out of the airport. This included my crappy computer, my crappy walkman which plays CDs, my parent's camera because we could not find our own, stuff like that. We found a jumbo flashlight and off went my dh, first to our house which we expected to be pitch black but wasn't (huh? oh well the least of our worries now), then to the airport. There at baggage claim behind the counter sat the carry-on, all our stuff in it, with a little list for claiming it. A christmas miracle. Meanwhile, back at my Mom and Dad's I had not yet entered the 7 stages of grief over losing my computer, my one job search tool I can count on, during this pivotal time. I had not yet even entered denial. I was all: find it. Period. Nothing like sleeping at your folks's house to turn you into a child all over again.
What else was happening - oh yes. I have some very expensive shoes and fancy insoles for days on my feet, because I have several different kinds of chronic foot problems which I won't go into too much here, aren't you lucky. Anyway, it's time for another pair of expensive shoes because those have had their day. So in addition to feeling completely ashamed for burying our renters in darkness cutting off their electricity, and grief from losing our computer and all that good stuff, I was having waves of foot pain driving me to take a cocktail of "may cause dizziness" type medications which were originally prescribed for different ailments altogether. Still haven't recovered from that one.
Anyway, the feet are drugged, the backpack is found with the computer in it, and what do you know but there was a bona fide power outage which was not my fault in the slightest. Had nothing to do with the bill. That was me coming home from Disney, a little bit of harsh reality but then a soft landing.
3 days into my post-infospace freedom (well, after the splurgey vacation) and only now have I started to create a healing environment where the inner judges have quieted down from their usual clamor. Everyone knows how hard I worked the past few months and how there would need to be recovery time from that even without a change in paycheck status. (In this instance, the paycheck status is changing from paycheck=check to paycheck=nope). It's just funny how when you expect everything to go wrong sometimes it actually does. I am looking forward to "real" life now, whatever that turns out to mean.