Now I Am Mad

Pretty much my title says it all. My site is still not back up and running nor have I received the site emailed to me as the original Terms of Service promised when I decided to place my site at its location. Any of my recent emails to the webmaster have also been returned to me as undeliverable so now I am also concerned as well as mad.

My most recent email stated the following - it was a response to my initial question of what had happened to my site and his response of removing some inactive sites that may have been causing the server problems:

"Not sure which of my emails you've recently received because I've had a few undeliverable so if this a duplicate then my apologies.

Please reinstate my web site ASAP. Admittedly I had only been updating once a month lately because of circumstances but I still had been updating way more frequently and recently than some. The highlighted ones below all have entries that are older than my most recent one. As I can't access any of my material, I don't remember the exact date of my last update but I know that it has definitely been within the past month. I certainly do not consider this an inactive site especially as you had previously advised us you wouldn't archive sites until at least three.

Kel July
Seedless July
blake March
Bonkers May
Beautiful Disaster July
Paint it Black June
Kitten July
Naomi April
Ogre June
Peregoric Kid July
Junkyard saint July
History of Madness Feb
Saturine July
Hacker May
b1ll1 April
sweetdreams July

If you are unable to put it back up then could you at least send the site to me? I have to admit that this has really upset me especially as you didn't notify me beforehand and I hadn't any idea what was even going on. Just checked it a few miinutes ago and it is still down.

Thanks... "

What's a girl to do???

Oh Where, Oh Where Has It Gone

I know that it's been an eternity since I posted here but so much has happened in the last little while that I haven't been able to dedicate as much time to the computer in general plus I also have another site that I use as my primary one - or at least I thought so. I'm actually kind of mad right now because without so much as a warning, my site was removed. I wasn't even given a heads up email before this was done.

One day about two and a half weeks ago, I tried to go to it to do an update and I received an error message stating:

The requested URL /sickgirl/ was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

WTF?

At first, I thought that the whole server was down so I didn't think too much about it but when I tried a couple of days after that and then a few more after that well, I started to kind of panic - two years of my life were invested in this site and I didn't have even the tiniest bit of it backed up. I darn near cried.

I emailed the individual that looks after the site but no response so I emailed him again at another one of his email accounts and finally after six days he responded by stating that he had removed all of the inactive sites but that he could put mine back up. Inactive. WTF? Mine had been updated less than a month prior while there were at least more than half of the ones that he kept hadn't even updated in three months or more. Man, the more I think of this, the uglier I get.

I've requested that it be reinstated and also if that can't be done, then to send me my site. He said to give him a day and that was today that I received his email so we shall see what happens tomorrow.

Now I Am At Peace

Well we are now pretty much settled into our new job and home. The first month is behind us and seeing how we both managed to survive the insanity of managing a 240 plus unit luxury highrise thus far, it can only mean smooth sailing from here on in! So far, so good. I wasn’t quite sure what I would actually think about this position when we first started, but now I have to admit that I actually really enjoy it.

Our “hours” are 8am to 5pm Monday to Friday plus we are “on call” every other weekend and every Tuesday and Thursday night, so not so bad. We got our first full pay check almost two weeks ago and after taxes, we cleared just shy of $1200 which is pretty darn good when you take into consideration that our rent, utilities, cable, phone and internet is also looked after before we actually receive this pay. We literally have no bills to speak of any more, so when this is factored into the whole equation, a net amount of $2400/month to use as our disposable income is pretty kickass. It’s definitely the best place financialy that we’ve been able to manage this past decade.

On top of this, I also receive $565/month from my father’s estate and I will for the next fourteen months to come, plus, Jim gets $200/week or approx $800/month from his parents and will continue to receive for the next few months also. So altogether, it looks as if we now have a take home income of $3765 each month for the very near future. Finally I’m in a position to buy new furniture for our entire place - have already started with new furniture for our bedrooms and dining room!

I know that its only money and up to this point of my life, I have been the farthest thing imaginable from materialistic, but as my girls get older - and I guess as I, too, get older - it suddenly has started to seem kind of important. Spending the previous five years living pay to pay certainly hasn’t done anything to help this mindset either I must admit. Please don’t crucify me yet, either as I’ve not suddenly taken to getting down on my knees to thank the god almighty of money - not yet, anyway!

The Changemaker Difference

It’s fairly infrequently that I take the time to recommend a particular website but I’ve come across one recently that I think most of us here would be able to benefit from in one way or another. If you have time, please try to check out Changemaker: Change Your Life. It’s been around since 2004 and has a tremendous amount of links concerning recovery. Primarily it is a site to aid in one’s path of self-discovery and healing. Following is essentially the site’s mission statement. I think that the author of the site can do a much better job explaining and describing her site than I could ever pretend to do. No doubt that I would end up doing a disservice!

The Changemaker Difference

Addiction treatment by the medical model means that an addict is “sick” and that someone else knows how to get that addict “well”. In reality, each person has a part of themselves that is perfect and was given to them at birth.

The basic problem with the medical model of addiction recovery is that the medical field calls someone “well” by sending them to take classes about symptoms and this determines the level of “help” that the “well” person will be able to give.

The reality of any emotional/mental help is that the healer can’t help beyond his/her level of recovery. We are all wounded healers but growth only happens after surrender to the need for recovery.

What other field of medicine focuses mainly or only on the symptoms? I mean, where is the cure? Certainly a label can help by identifying what information is needed to lead to a cure. But how does telling someone that they are in denial help that person to understand that their thinking is faulty?

Denial is not about lying but about someone not knowing the truth. Isn’t it more helpful to say that an addict is someone using a learned pattern of behavior to deal with uncomfortable feelings? If there are problems because of the addiction, then the learned pattern has to be given up and a new pattern of behavior has to be chosen for the energy used to be a positive for the addict.

In other words, some of the main issues in addiction treatment are maturity issues. The age at which a person started drinking, using, eating, buying, being overpowering to others, using sex, etc. is the emotional age he/she still is. If he/she started at age 15, which is pretty normal, then he/she is age 14 emotionally.

So recovery is generally about growing up. Another main issue of why people are addictive is to continue to live life in their head or in their imagination. No one knows reality–we only have a perception of reality.

As the hero in 10 Million Ways to Die says,”I never knew that I lived in a world that I hadn’t created..” That is why the addict experiences such anger at having to give up the addiction. The addict believes that his/her using only affects him/her and is no one else’ business. In reality, the addiction is affecting everyone in the addict’s life.

In the self-discovery model of group healing, everyone in the group is a student. The sharing of power in relationships defines the health of the relationship. No hierarchy is needed when people enter groups to help each other. The leadership of the group can be shared by all on a rotation basis.

The group members in the self-discovery group must agree to follow guidelines that the group chooses. The main goal of the group should be short-term with the idea of splitting up to form new groups. Some people may choose to recycle–repeat the same group–before branching out to their own group. After 2-3 times recycling, the other group members may help with the formation of new group to a group member who needs more support.

The Mental Health Institute claims 20% of the population suffers from mental illness. These people generally can benefit from mental health counseling. In America, with all our wealth, many of these poor souls wander our streets as the homeless. They have no medical insurance so menat health care is a sometime thing. Since most of the population isn’t mentally ill, education groups can be a great source of comfort and growth for those not needing therapy.

Go here to read the original.

One Day At A Time

Well I guess that I should fill you all into what has actually been happening in my life recently. Me and mine have been fairly busy as we attempt to adjust to our new home as well as new jobs, not to mention the simple fact alone that I’ve had to adjust to the fact that I was actually returning to work after such a long period of time off!

With my arm being in the shape that it is now in, coupled with the fact that I had pretty much burned myself out doing tech support just prior to my leaving my job last year, I knew that once the decision had been made for me to return to work that I was going to have to have some form of plan in order for me to be able to try something completely different.

Well, I am pretty confident that I’ve succeeded way beyond my wildest dreams in this particular area.

So please bear with me a little bit. Yes, Jim and I have been doing great with our recovery and MMT, and we certainly are no longer spending the shocking amounts of money that we had been just a year and a half ago. By some sort of miracle we have also managed to dig ourselves out of a pretty deep hole and are no longer in debt. Period. Full stop. Yet, at the same time, we also found ourselves struggling to make any significant financial headway. I know that a combination of events somewhat sabotaged us - my arm breaking didn’t help but it did pretty much result in us having only one provider which just happened to occur at the same time that we experienced another adult sized person joining our family. Yikes. At least we managed to stay afloat.

This situation certainly was fine for the short term but I was beginning to find the whole thing somewhat untenable. Each time I came back from looking at the size of apartment that ideally I wanted in a luxury high rise, the more frustrated everything became. Realistically we were going to have to pay approx $1500 plus on average each month for what I wanted. That amount seemed pretty far out of my reach for the immediate future. Or was it? One day I had a magical and utterly brilliant idea.

Jim and I own a 23 unit, three story walk up apartment building about a half an hour out of town and have owned it since December 2000. This is to be our Freedom 55 as the mortgage will more or less be paid of by then so that when we “retire” we’ll have 23 units multiplied by whatever the rent will be then all to ourselves - less any monthly operating costs, etc. Currently Jim also draws a monthly salary from this business and does the lion’s share of any work required which ends up averaging approx 15 days per month give or take. We also pay one of our tenants a small monthly stipend to keep an eye on everything as we don’t actually reside at the property.

From here, I more or less expanded my idea in the hopes that we could apply - and hopefully get hired - to some of the more desirable high rise apartment buildings in London for the position of Building Manager. I ended up spending a good six plus months researching the various property management companies as well as the types of properties that each company owned. I finally narrowed our choices down to three although I was a little bit unsure of my third choice. As it so happened, we actually got hired by my number one choice so you can well imagine how utterly excited and happy I was. Jim and I are now Building Managers of the property in the photo above this entry.

We started our jobs exactly 12 days ago so we are very much newbies to this particular experience. When I was doing my research, I based my choices on said company’s properties with no actual knowledge of what kind of renumeration that would be offered. As it turns out, this company not only has spectacular buildings, they also have a renumeration package beyond compare.

As well as receiving a three bedroom, two full bathroom 1425 square foot apartment valued at $1500 per month, the company also pays for all of our utilities, telephone, cable, internet and newspaper delivery daily at our doorstep. In three months, we will also have a full benefit package. Our starting salary is $36 000 with a raise also in three months and from then on, a raise on an annual basis. On our third day of employment, I received a call from their main office advising me that our computer was ready for pickup!

I sure am hard pressed to find too many more companies like this one! Of course, I’m sure that you are all thinking that there has to be a catch somewhere and I don’t blame anyone for thinking that either. I sure as heck was waiting nervously for the other shoe to drop so to speak and as of today, I’m still waiting. All of their employees are long term ones with the average length of time with them approx ten years. The only reason that they even had an opening was that they had just completed building a brand new sixteen story building.

Wow, eh? What absolutely blows my mind right now is that we no longer have any bills at all to pay. I asked Jim what I was going to do with my daytimer from now on…That’s not an absolute truth as we still have to pay $300 total each month for our methadone but this too shall disappear in less than three month’s time now. Cool n’est pas?

Moving On Up

Once again it seems as if its been an eternity since I bothered to do any updates which is my bad but this time I have some really valid excuses. Just this past month alone we have moved house at the exact time that I finally returned to work after almost a year off. Wow, my head is still kind of spinning!!!

First let me tell you all about our move cause this in itself is a huge reflection of how far Jim and I have managed to come this past sixteen months. We had been living in a decent enough spot but it certainly wasn’t near as nice of a place that I had been accustomed to, so for me, it very much felt like a step backwards and the entire time that we were there, it was a constant struggle for me to remain positive. I literally loathed eveything about this place and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

More than anything else though, it was a constant reminder of what we had been forced to settle for due to our addictions taking precedent over most everything else.  Each morning that I woke up still living under that same roof was another day where I felt like a massive failure regardless of what other successes we were experiencing. I literally could not escape these feelings although the flipside was that this environment became a huge motivator for change and if change meant putting every spare penny away so that we could afford to put a deposit down on my dream home then so be it.

And it worked fabulously as I am now sitting in my massive new bedroom of our three bedroom, two full bathroom 1425 square foot apartment condo. This is a huge step up for us as previously the four of us - plus we now have six cats cause of the newborn kittens - were crammed into a rather small two bedroom where our bathroom only had room for a shower and no bathtub. The two girls were forced to share a bedroom that barely measured 10′ by 10′. Truly depressing. Now the girls have one bedroom that measures 16′ by 13′ and another that measures 12′ by 19′.

They’ve actually decided to continue to share a bedroom and turn the extra room into a tv/lounge room so that when they have friends over, they won’t have to invade our space. Personally, I think that this is a brilliant idea although right now we don’t have any furniture for it but this situation shouldn’t last too long.

One of the other things that had been bothering me at our old place was the state of our furniture so I decided that when we did finally move, I was going to leave most of it behind and start anew. The girls had been sharing Sara’s double bed but Jim and I decided to get them their own beds once we moved. They picked out these matching solid pine single bed frames with a rail round three of the edges. We also bought them new mattresses for each of their bed frames as well as matching three drawer bedside tables. Sara picked out a really funky brushed silver floor lamp that fans out to approx six separate lights - hard to describe but its really cool!

We got a complete bedroom suite for ourselves - head and foot board, two side tables, a short, long nine drawer dresser with mirror and a tall, narrow five drawer dresser in the darkest brown wood - almost black - that we could find. The handles of our suite are very plain but are done in a brushed silver that looks fabulous. We also bought a new dinette set - a 3′ by 3′ bar table -  means that it is taller than normal or 36″ tall - with four matching wooden chairs with their seat cushions covered in a taupe microsuede. This set is also the darkest brown that we could find.

That’s all that we could afford for the moment but we’re off to a good start. I’m so excited and can’t wait to get our new furniture - it doesn’t arrive until this Wednesday which is now only two days away!

Must dash as I’m up to my eyeballs in laundry.