Another day in a cop's wife's life

So today a survey trivia question on Q102's Listener Rewards was "Name something a cop's wife might not like about his job"...my first response, being a cop's wife, is "time constraints"...turns out this isn't the number 1 answer given of people surveyed. Of course, it's not of cop's wives surveyed, it's people that log on to this radio trivia website. The answer most given is "dangerous." Now, maybe I'm just being selfish? When Jim's on 2nd shift, we barely see each other. When he's on 3rd shift, he sleeps while I'm working and vice versa. But on weekends that bites, too. Am I being selfish by wanting to spend more time with my husband than I get to? Am I not liking the wrong thing about his job? Am I being neurotic? That one's hypothetical...

On my way home there is a road that goes from 35 mph to 25, once you go through a light. I know this, because it's in the area we live in, where Jim used to patrol. And part of me wants to defy the limit, continuing to go 35. Why? I know the guys there, and I know also that they don't agree with the limit there either. It's 1/2 residential, but it's 2 lanes either way so it feels like it should be 35. The other part of me wants to obey it strictly, because I should be setting an example as a law-abiding citizen, not expecting to get out of it because "I know a guy." If anything, it looks worse when a cop or a spouse speeds, because they should know better, right?

Thoughts?

4/24

Whoa! I've been gone for a week at Six Sigma training. It was...overwhelming! I was in Mansfield, MA, which is about 45 minutes outside of Boston. Tyco has an office there, and it's far nicer than our Cincinnati facilities.

While I was at training, I came to the realization that I am far more Type A than I thought I was. Eek. It's kind of embarassing, really, that I didn't know this about myself before now.

Cate is dancing in Fringe Festival next month. I am excited. Should be fun!

Not much else to report; have been gardening a lot lately. Anybody know how to make crabgrass go away?

Oh, by the way, Jim and I watched our nieces over the weekend. Yikes! Cate is 18 months, and Emma is 4 1/2. I am NOT into getting up as early as they both like to get up! Now, it might be that Melissa has conditioned them to wake up at 6:00 IN THE MORNING!!!

Or it could be that I'm just not into that scene. I don't really dig the two kids at once thing, either, so that could be it. Or it could be that we're just not ready for kids yet.

The dogs are barking at some random passer-by, and that's ticking me off enough. I don't think I could handle that in clothing and school, to boot.

UDF

So this morning I wake up at 8, feed the dogs and let them out, figuring Jim will be home within the next 30 min to let them back in.

I wake up at 9:30 and he's still not home. Get dogs, call him. Armed robbery with felonious assault at UDF. This guy robbed UDF with multiple people inside, covering his face with a Crown Royal bag, got some cigarettes, and beat the crap out of the clerk. From what I hear, they weren't sure she was going to make it this morning. So they're on the hunt for this guy, get the K9 out, find a trail but not the guy. They talk to the girlfriend, etc.
Jim gets a call from a lady who says some weird guy is running around. They show up, Jim tracks down this guy hiding in the thicket. Jim gets the arrest. Other guys are jealous. :)

Later in the day we found out that fortunately, the clerk was in stable condition at the hospital. At least there's a silver lining.

ugh. sleep.

I cannot sleep. I am not even tired. it's almost 3:00 Sunday night / Monday morning. And I have to be to work at 8. I'm wide awake. Reading doesn't help. Talked to Jim; he mentioned there was an explosion of some sort shortly before midnight, and everybody in the county was calling about it. Turns out it was an explosion in the next county over, at AK Steel. Very strange.

So how much does it suck that I tell blogger.com to 'remember me' every time I log in, and yet every few days when I log in, it forgets me?

Meditation or Mediation?

So I drove back to work in silence today, at lunch. I guess I needed the meditation time. I'm not really sure what prompted it, other than the static of the radio, prior to turning on the Sirius, which was really annoying. So instead of turning on the Sirius, I turned the radio off. And the 10 - 15 minutes i spent in silence, trying to reason out some of the things that have been bothering me so much lately. The first question that pops into my head is, "Why do people want to stop being friends with someone?" In other words, what is it that makes a person decide, "Hey, I don't want to associate with this person anymore."
My sis-in-law and I have discussed this before, and she has confessed to "downgrading" someone if their behavior or actions are getting on her nerves. In other words, she won't hang out with them as much. But she doesn't completely cut off all ties or anything drastic. And the person we were talking about at the time has since been 'upgraded' again. But what I am referring to is when people 'dump' a friend, never having any contact with them again whatsoever. It's obviously hurtful. But in my mind, I'm thinking that the only thing that would cause me to do that to someone else is something irreparable, or quite severe. Then I think back on people who have done this to me, and I can't think of a single example of something that I've done that would fall into this category. I've never committed any crimes, never made a pass at someone's significant other, never done anything deliberatley destructive, and so on.
So I'm still driving and I start to think that maybe the question isn't about other people, but about me. Why do I have the need to ahve a lot of friends, or a large social group? Setting aside the anthropological discussion, I realize peole are social creatures, pack animals and such. But I'm not talking about acquaintances. There's something at my very core that requires people that, in the past, I've referred to as the family by choice. Those people who you are pretty close to, as close as family, but it's by choice, not by birth or marriage. Am I expecting too much by asking the universe for those people in my life? Am I incorrectly perceiving other people as having those relationships? Is it necessary to my survival to have those people? And why do I take it so very personally when I am 'dumped?'
I should preface that by adding that I try to apply The Four Agreements to my life as often as possible. I notice improvements in my life when I do. And at the very core of the Agreements, and the first and foremost Agreement is "Do not take anything personally." Read the book for deeper discussions, but the long and short of it is this: Nothing that anybody does to you is because of you. What they do is because of their own perceptions, their own personalities, their own life. Not you.
I had a revelation after I start thinking about how sad it is that our friends Ross and Carol will most likely be moving to Qatar in the next few months. Being smack dab in the middle of the Persian Gulf, surrounded by American-hating countries isn't very conducive to us visiting them very often. So it's very likely we won't see much of them anymore. Does this make me sad? Of course! By description, we practically aren't going to be friends with them anymore. We won't get to talk to them very often, and won't see them much, if at all. But of course we're still friends. Down the road, if we see them, we can pick up where we left off. And I'm not taking their move personally at all. I could, of course. Jim and I could twist it around to be about us. They're moving to the middle East because they don't want to be friends with us anymore.

Now, I realize this is patently absurd.

But when someone makes another type of decision that affects their relationship with you, such as a personality clash, it becomes incredibly easy to internalize it, take it to heart. So I am confused with how I can get around this. It hurts, and I wish it didn't happen. But there's not a lot I can do about it. Should I change my personality? Well, then they don't like me for *me*. And if I try to apply this same example with Ross and Carol, us changing anything (realistically) isn't going to change their decision to move. So how do I come to grips with being dumped? Why does it constantly haunt me? Last week I was laying in bed, trying to sleep and instead this shit is going through my head, and I end up having a crying jag til about 1:30 in the morning. How much is too much? What is a normal amount of sorrow, and what is depression?

So to end, I'd like to know what it is that would cause you, daer reader, to completely close someone out of your life. And my sincerest wish, though we may never meet, is that nobody ever does this to you.

C'mon people, don't be that stupid

So this morning, Jim's sitting at a red light, 5 or 6 cars back. A car somewhere behind him decides she needs to be in the left-turn lane, and crosses the double-yellow line to get ahead of the long line at the light, passing him in the process. So, he pulls her over.
"Can I see your license?"
She hands it to him with a great, inconvenienced sigh.
"Do you know why I pulled you over?"
In a snotty tone, "No, not really."
"Well, you crossed a double yellow line back there."
"So, I do that every day."
...
Here's the point at which I must pause and ask, with all seriousness, did you REALLY just admit to breaking the law, EVERY DAY? I know people have all these theories about evading the cops, not getting a ticket, and such, but this really isn't the way to go about it!
Jim says to her, "That doesn't make it legal."
She replies in a huffy tone, "Lots of people do it all the time!"
Jim replies, "Still doesn't make it legal. I'll be back in a minute with your ticket."

Are you kidding me? "Officer, I killed my friend, but 183 other people did it last year!" Look, if you are going to be an idiot and break the law, at least be humble about it. I have probably done what this lady did, once or twice. Not a lot, mind you, because I'm not in the habit of driving into oncoming traffic, whether or not I'm in a hurry. But you bet your ass if I got pulled over doing it, I'm not going to be rude to the officer in an effort to get out of it.

Here's another example: Jim pulled over a guy whose driver's license had expired. He punches in the numbers, the guy's license has been expired for two weeks. Easy thing to overlook, right? So Jim asks for it, says "You know your license expired two weeks ago?"
The guy looks at Jim with that 'oh shit' expression and says, "FUCK!"
Now, this guy's in his 50s, so one might argue that he's been renewing his license a lot in his life. But on the other hand, when it only rolls around every four years, it's easy to see how that can slip by. So Jim hands him his license back and says "Just get it taken care of. Have a nice day."

So I guess the moral of the story is obvious. Don't break the law? Duh. But what I'm really getting at here today is that your attitude is everything, especially when dealing with someone who has power over you. Most people would learn pretty quickly if they spoke rudely to their boss. But why does it make it OK to be rude to anybody else?

House of Leaves

Well I let my sister talk me into reading this book, House of Leaves. It is MESSED UP. It's about this guy who finds a manuscript in this dead guy's apartment. The manuscript is about a movie that supposedly doesn't exist (or does it?) and the dead guy was writing notes about it, on every single thing he could write on. The movie is about this guy's house that is bigger on the inside than on the outside. Something about the way it's written is seriously giving me the creeps. And not in an overt, Stephen King or Dean Koontz way, either. The guy who finds the manuscript keeps adding his own notes to it, which are found in different font at the bottom of the pages. He writes in this incredibly long, rambling-thought-process way, with an entire page consisting of thoughts joined by commas. It's pretty hard to follow.

So I've been checking this blog, My Open Wallet, quite frequently. I found it through Clicked, but it's pretty insightful. It's about this woman in NY who blogs about her expenditures, her savings, investments, etc. She has a lot of links to other financial blogs. It's nice to read from *real* people about financial tips. I tried reading the journalist on MSNBC, but some of her tips are based on assuming you already have that extra cash to sock away every day. Don't buy that coffee at Starbucks, get the free coffee at work or buy your own. Well, what about those of us who ALREADY DO THAT? Well, I don't drink coffee, I drink tea, but same thing. So check it out.

Anyhoo, Ed says he's updated. We'll see about that.

A cop's work?

Well, Jim works 3rd shift. He likes it for the most part. I like it too, because it means we get our evenings together. When he works 2nd shift, we never see each other. I work til 4:30, and he goes in to work at 4, which means he leaves the house no later than 3:30. And comes home at midnight. You see the problem. With 3rd shift, he sleeps while I'm at work, and I sleep while he's at work. It's a great arrangement, someone's almost always home, we see each other a ton more, we actually get to eat dinner together, etc. But when he comes home in the morning, and I ask him how his night was, the response is almost always the same.
'Quiet.'
'Boring.'
'Not a single run all night.'
Now, to anybody who has had a job that is terribly boring, you know this sucks big ones. Your time at work goes much quicker when you have things to do. Especially when you have a job that you enjoy. Even more so when it's a job you wanted to have since you were young.
But when my husband has nothing to do, that means nothing is going on. IE, crimes aren't happening. Isn't that a good thing?