Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Great Friends

Ok, so Tuesday at work was the first time in a long time that I got really down because of a problem that I have had with my back since I was a sophomore in high school. I started working at 8 0'clock and by 8:20 my back was already making me very uncomfortable. I sat there just thinking about it for a couple of minutes and then forced myself to ignore the pain for the rest of the day - barring all of the popping and cracking throughout the day.


Most every day, I experience mild to medium discomfort in my back, mainly due to a degenerated disc between my Lumbosacral joint which is where the lumbar spine meets the sacrum. In addition to the degenerated disc, I also have a mild case of spondylolisthesis...

Jumping to a completely different topic, I had an incident occur on Tuesday. The reasons why it happened to me I do not know for sure. It honestly felt like God had taken over - my body, my emotions, everything. I lost control and I tried to take it back but there was something more powerful in control. He wasn't hurting me, even though I was crying and rolling on the floor uncontrollably. I am still in the process of trying to figure out all of the reasons that this happened, but one thing that I do know for certain as a result of that night is that I have been blessed with incredible friends. The two from the night are David Wallisch and David Skelton. Those two stayed with me even though it all started in the middle of the night at around 2am and we didn't get back to bed until around 6am. Either one - or both - could have just told me to get a hold of myself and gone to bed, but they helped me through without any hesitation whatsoever. It's cliche, but those are really the most true; great friends are hard to find. I am so lucky to have these two incredible men as my friends. I wish I could put into words how much I appreciate them.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Some Perspective


Wow! So many awesome things happened this week. To start off the weekend, I got to go see Annie on Friday. We went to a drive-in movie without knowing what movies were playing...we saw Twilight Eclipse - the second movie was Letters to Julia, we left because it was getting really late. Twilight wasn't bad. I didn't really know what was happening because I have never seen the other two. But it was so much fun. Good company makes for a good time no matter where you go.

The next awesome event took place on Tuesday. A Tuesday of all days! It started off, well as all Tuesdays start...suck. Work. What else can I say? But things started looking up when my boss asked me to sharpen the tools in the garage. Well, I bought a machete on my service trip to Belize over spring break and...well it was the perfect opportunity. So I rushed to my townhouse and sharpened it at work. This gets better. When I got home from work, my roommate David Skelton and I found a snake in our living room. How do you get rid of a snake in your living room? Well, if you just sharpened a machete that same day, you take matters into your own hands and cut its head off. I followed these instructions, and I highly recommend them. The results are incredible!
I ended the work week with a task given to me by my boss to cut out a huge bush. He gave me a pair of loppers. All of the branches were intertwined and just a complete mess. I started cutting at the branches and it was taking forever. I wasn't making any progress. Then the thought entered my head..."If only I had a machete that I had sharpened on Monday; that would just make this whole thing so much easier. Oh, wait!" I sped off down to my house to retrieve my machete and, long story short, it took me five minutes to have the entire thing taken out. What a great buy!
This whole week has really put things into perspective for me. My life has been so blessed. I talked to Annie about a mentally handicapped girl she worked with. The girl is 19 and is just learning how to read and write. Annie told me how excited the girl was that she was finally learning how to read. I take for granted every day my ability to read and write; sometimes I even complain about having to read for school. This helped me realize how lucky I am to have grown up in an environment where I was able to get a great education. I could fill hundreds of pages with all of the other blessings which I take for granted every day. I am so thankful for the life that I have been given!








Thursday, July 1, 2010

New Experience


Last weekend, I was given the great opportunity of working on a guy's roof. I know him from work and he asked a few other guys that I work with to help him. I knew that I needed the money (after all, I just got the key to my house yesterday which cost me first month's rent of $250). Anyway, he offered a pretty penny for the work - almost twice what I get paid at my regular job - so there was no way that I was going to turn it down.
Friday, I realized after the weekend was out, ended up being the hardest day. The sun was high and hot; the humidity kicking my butt. The work that I did that day was the most physically demanding as well. I helped tear off two layers of shingles. The first layer came off with relative ease, and we had removed it all within a few hours. The second layer, however, was a completely different story. It took us the remainder of the day, plus another 3 hours the following day to remove the second layer from the roof. I'm not going to complain because the hours that I ended up working paid off big time, but if the guys that had laid the second layer of shingles had actually done their job by taking off the first layer before laying the new layer, we may have completely finished the roof during the weekend.
After our second day of work, the guy asked the four of us if we wanted to come back on Sunday. He said there was a lot of work yet to do and he could really use our help, but he understood if we wanted a day off before going back to work on Monday. I was all over it. The other three were more hesitant. I showed up to his house alone Sunday morning and, as it turned out, the other three guys missed the wrong day. A morning storm kept the rest of the day relatively cool; the work was a lot less physically demanding as we basically just nailed down boards of plywood all day; and breaks were numerous. In addition to all of that, he fed me lunch and dinner. Score for the college kid who's paying for his own groceries!

While the money I made from this opportunity was more than I could have asked for, the new experience that I gained was priceless. I learned things this past weekend that I will carry on to when I own my own home (God-willing). I am no expert roofer by any means, but at least now I have some basic knowledge of the steps that need to be taken in order to fix a roof if ever the necessity arises (God forbid).