My Life as I Know It

It’s been awhile since I posted, I know, but sometimes life just gets in the way of the things you love. So, where to begin? Well, let’s start with the most significant incident in my life in the past couple of weeks: I’m unemployed again. The job I took recently suddenly fell apart last week (after less than two months), so I’m on the hunt again. Long story short: The company wasn’t bringing in enough money, so they had to lay off a bunch of people. Enough said.

So I’m looking for jobs again (if anyone knows of anything, you know where I can be reached), and I’m trying my hardest to get myself back into shape. Which leads me to significant incident No. 2: I pulled a tendon in my right foot. To most people, this might not be such a big deal. But for me, it’s a huge deal! I just started a fitness program three weeks ago (shameless plug here: Extreme Fit Training), and it’s an extremely tough program, but even tougher when you can’t use your feet. I’ve gotten used to burning 800 or so calories a class, and I can’t figure out how I’m gonna be able to do that without the running, jumping, hopping, and lunging required to get my heart rate up. But I’m trying to stay positive while also staying off my injured foot for the next two weeks (I’ll still go to class and do abs, arms, squats—whatever I can to burn, burn, burn!). Luckily, after this final week of Boot Camp, our next class doesn’t start for another week.

On to Incident No. 3: My car flooded last week. As long as I’ve lived in the South, I can’t remember a time that we’ve had so much rain! It lasted for more than a month, and it rained every day! And I don’t mean a few sprinkles in the afternoon; I mean full-on, heavy, coming-in-from-all-angles, drops-as-big-as-walnuts rain! It’s only now gotten to the point where the sun peeks through now and again. So last week, Kensie and I were going to a friend’s house to hang out and have lunch, your typical Mom/Daughter play date. So I open the door to my car (not raining at this point, amazingly), and it smacks me in the face. A smell so awful, so rank, so gnarly that I wanted to turn around and run the other way! I literally thought something had died in there. I pulled everything out and began my search. Did I leave a dirty diaper in the car that had rolled under the seat? I’ve never changed a dirty diaper in the car. Was there a bag of groceries filled with fruit and meat I’d forgotten about in the trunk? Not that I could find. Had an animal crawled up into my engine and died? Well, I’ve heard of that happening, but I could find nothing. So, against my better judgment (but with few other options), I rolled down all the windows and threw K in the car to go meet my dad so he could check it out. Almost immediately, he noticed the soaked mats and floors. What I smelled in that car was mold. MOLD!!

So, you know I watch HGTV. And one of my favorite shows is Rental Property. Inevitably on that show, the basement of the subjects is completely swamped with mold. They wear masks whenever they enter the dwelling, especially when they’re working on pulling out the moldy carpets or sheet rock. They make it very clear that mold is not something you mess with; it can make a person very sick. All I could think was that I’d been putting my kid in that car, and that mold could have been in there a month! I mean, how long does it take mold to get to the point of smelling like a dead sea lion that’s washed up on the beach and decomposed for a month? I sure don’t know!

So K and I get to my girlfriend’s house (we were already close, so why turn around now), and I was nearly in tears. But thanks to the level-headedness of my friend who’d just been through a bunch of craziness herself and had learned to deal with it, I called the insurance company who instructed me on what to do. File a claim. Take the car in. Rent a car (thank goodness for reliable car insurance). Move on.

So today, I’m driving a cherry-red Jeep Liberty rental while waiting on my car to be fully cleaned and de-molded. Though the insurance company won’t fix the problem (they say there’s no way to identify it; huh?), at least by day’s end I will be driving a mold-free blue Tucson with my butt imprint in the driver’s seat and the light above Kensie’s head that I can turn off and on at her will (it didn’t go over well that there was no light in the Liberty for her to control). Maybe after a week of me exercising like a maniac hopped up on speed while my car was in the shop, that butt imprint will be just a little bit bigger than the actual thing. A girl can dream!