not freak out

be careful what you wish for,you just might get it

i can do it
really i can

only a few more sleeps

last night i walked and walked… got a blister and kept telling myself, just a little bit further, just around the corner will be the street you need… to no avail. it started getting dark, and i could just hear my husband’s voice in my head “be wise”, “don’t take chances”, “bring a map”, don’t go out after dark”, et al… so my head started screaming all these things, while i’m trying not to panic as i get more lost and as it gets more dark.
...finally, i found a taxi and he drove me back to the BnB : )
all’s good : )
did not freak out

i used to get panic attacks, and then as we were dating and starting our marriage they slowly became less and less frequent until they went from every other day, to twice per year, to nothing.

now when he goes away… it’s so sad that they creep in on me. it’s like my touch-stone is gone and the illusion of inner strength, inner stability begins to collapse… i will not let this happen. i can not let this happen. it is illogical; we will be apart for nearly 4 weeks and it’s only day two… i have to overcome. stiffen up. go DO something.

this is a question i ask my husband everyday… sometimes 10x a day. and he always answers “yes, leanne, i love you”
more than ice cream?
“yes, i love you more than ice cream”
more than forever?
“yes, i love you more than forever”
more than the moon?
“yes, i love you more than everything… except God”, which is a qualifier that i can live with. sometimes, when i’m alone, i say these things out loud and i say his lines for him.

My next door neighbour has told me yesterday that he will again try to extend his non-existing garden patch next to ours into the unused space to the depth of our patch, sealing off our exit to the left.
If this happens, the whole sale of the house will be in trouble, because the owners of the creche building will want all gardens to be finished off with a straight line. They might insist to have the kadaster office involved. The consequence would be that all our fences would have to be moved, thus not only destroying planting schemes that have been established over the years, but we’d have to (re-)move the pond and waterfeature, because our entrance would have to be at this end of the garden. We’d also have trouble with our next door neighbour on the left, because we’d have to straighten out the line of the fence there. Furthermore, if you look at the sketch, you will see that the garden two doors down has a garden house at the end, which is placed on a concrete foundation. The house reaches out further than our garden and the one next door. This will be disputed over and thus create a legal issue which no potential buyer for our place will want to get involved. Oh: and we might be offered to buy off the land for 50 years. For 500 – 600 EUR per square metre. Anyone got 21.000 Euro for me? Or for the other two neighbours affected? I doubt they have that kind of cash stashed away somewhere. Unresolved property issues = difficult sale! Who wants to buy a property with “possibly a garden” that’s gonna cost you? Arse. Arse, arse, arse.

My boss dropped a bomb on me today.
She tried to give me an unscheduled evaluation to “better my performance”. I know my technical knowledge stinks and I couldn’t care less about the technical background of till systems, after all I was hired for my language skills (I know I am excellent with my customers, I don’t let them feel like they are imbecils, as she does).
Another point of criticism was that I don’t show enough initiative for her liking.
I told her that I felt completely ambushed by a written evaluation and so she postponed it for a couple of weeks to give me time to better myself. I will have to keep a diary of what I’ve learned each week (1 thing a week), plus one thing I volunteered to do per week.
I feel quite singled out by her. I am the runt of the pack, get openly criticised and corrected by her, but frankly I don’t give a damn, as she so correctly suspects. The only thing that totally p*sses me off is that she wants me to trade places with a colleague so I am more included in the team work related hive mind talk.
I love my place. The team sits in a U-shape and I am the bottom, so I am facing every body. Changing to the seat she wants me to have will only change one thing: I will be sitting right in front of her, with my back and my screen facing her. At least I don’t have to see her anymore all the time. But having her litereally in my back will make me paranoid.
I mean, the last time this happened was when I was uhm 11 and had to sit right at the teacher’s desk. I am 33 and I feel like I did then: helpless and totally exposed.
Why am I still doing this job? Because it’s better money than I’d get anywhere else on short notice and I love cycling only 20 minutes to work. And because bf and I have been wanting to move away for quite some time but never get our arses out of the chair and really do it.
After my sister’s wedding, this will change. Radically. I need to get away.
In a way, boss has gotten quite the opposite reaction out of me than she intended. Instead of wanting to try harder to work better for her, I want to quit my job and put the greatest distance possible between her and me.

We still haven’t received any letter regarding the garden, so I guess our neighbour is thinking that because he got one, we will. But we didn’t build a garden shed on a concrete foundation, extending the length of the garden by another 2 meters. So we think that the owner of the property is p*ssed off that the dude built the shed, not that the gardens exist.
But we don’t know for sure. So the situation is still unclear, and I am getting another lesson in the art of Zen.
Regarding the roof: Our upstairs neighbour thinks the flood we had in our kitchen (litres of water flowing down the INside of the window and kitchen wall) last week was caused by a clogged pipe. I hope he is right and has fixed it by now. I do not intend to spend the next rainy days monitoring the kitchen for signs of flooding.

what can I say… drip-drip-drip-drip…

The unclaimed land has been sold. Not to us. To somebody else. We weren’t even asked if we wanted to buy it, and the former owner, the municipality, knew we and all our neighbours wanted to buy the land behind our/their kitchen window.
Turns out my neighbour from two doors down has received a request to remove his garden shed, which he finished building two weeks ago.